Greece Guide
Northern Greece
Kavála
Backing onto the easterly foothills of Mount Sýmvolo, KAVÁLA is the second-largest city of Macedonia and the second port for northern Greece; it was an extremely wealthy place in the nineteenth century when the region's tobacco crop was shipped from its docks to the rest of the world. Although its attempt to style itself as the "Azure City", on account of its position at the head of a wide bay, is going a little overboard, it does have a characterful centre, focused on the harbour area and the few remaining tobacco warehouses. A picturesque citadel looks down from a rocky promontory to the east, and an elegant Ottoman aqueduct leaps over modern buildings into the old quarter on the bluff. Although the remnants of Kavála's Ottoman past are mostly neglected, the wedge-shaped Panayía quarter to the east of the port preserves a scattering of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings with atmospheric lanes wandering up towards the citadel.
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