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If you’re a summer party animal, Chersonisos is the place for you. Not far from the airport, this former fishing village has become a continuous strip of bars, clubs, restaurants and guesthouses stretching along one of Crete’s best beaches. A multinational (but mainly British) clientele (see Chersonisos).

Malia rivals its neighbour Chersonisos as a nightlife hot spot. It has been a party town for some 30 years, and its main street is lined with cocktail bars, restaurants, video bars and dance clubs. Along this stretch, happy hour can last most of the evening (see Malia).

Platanias is where most of Chania’s younger residents go to party on summer weekends. There are at least a dozen great clubs, most with open-air dance floors, and things do not really start to get lively until well after midnight (see Platanias).

Music blasts out from most of the cafés and bars along the harbour front at Chania on summer evenings, and if you prefer an evening of bar-hopping and café-crawling to a night in the dance clubs there are few better places in the whole of Crete. Most younger Chaniots, however, desert the cafés for the clubs of Platanias after the toll of midnight (see Chania).

Agios Nikolaos has a surprisingly lively after-dark scene, compared with its day-time placidity. The town’s nightlife hot spot is Odos 25 Martiou (running uphill from the southeast corner of the harbour), where there are half a dozen or more music bars, with as many again around the harbour. The town’s dance club scene is more limited, with only one or two full-on clubs (see Agios Nikolaos).

Most of the liveliest music-bars are in the streets inland from the harbour. Later on, the nightlife scene shifts to the openair discos and clubs in the resort area, along the seafront east of the centre (see Rethymno).

Not many holidaymakers stay in Crete’s capital (see Irakleio), so its nightlife scene is more staid than in the resorts. Young locals congregate in the cafés and music bars around Plateia Venizelou and Odos Chandakou, but the discos near the harbour are rather seedy.

A hippy hideout well into the 1980s (see Paleochora), Paleochora’s nightlife is still laid-back to a fault. A handful of relaxed – and none too noisy – music bars are scattered along the Pebble Beach waterfront, where, just out of town, there are a couple of open-air discos.

A small resort (see Agia Galini) that has made catering to the party crowd its specialism. Things get lively by 11pm in a cluster of bars and dance clubs around the harbour, where you can club-hop until the early hours.

The nightlife is a good deal less frenzied here than at other resorts along the north coast, but many a pleasant evening can be spent wandering from bar to bar along the waterfront. There are half a dozen good dance clubs (see Siteia).