Beneath the harbour at Hersonissos lie the rock-cut fish tanks of a Roman fishery, cut straight into the shelf of limestone and still legible under a metre of clear water. Boats leaving on Jet Boat Hersonissos Crete tours pass directly above them. The settlement's older name was Chersonesos, meaning peninsula, and for centuries it worked as the seaport of Lyttos, a powerful inland city with no coastline of its own. Grain, oil and cut stone left from this same rock. The harbour was engineering before it was leisure. Rome enlarged the port. A pyramid-shaped fountain, its mosaic floor showing fishermen and their craft, survives near the seafront, and traces of an aqueduct run inland towards the hills of Koutouloufari and Piskopiano. Byzantine basilicas followed. Venetian charts named the anchorage Chersonisso. Fishing families held the waterfront into the 1960s, when the first hotels appeared along the Lasithi road. Within thirty years the village had become one of the busiest resorts on the north coast of Crete. The Roman quays did not vanish; they simply went under, submerged by a slow rise in sea level that geologists date to the sixth century. West of the port the volcanic mass of Dia Island rises from the Cretan Sea, uninhabited, ringed by four bays. Jacques Cousteau dived there in 1976 and reported submerged walls he read as Minoan harbour works. The island now shelters kri-kri, the wild goat of Crete, under state protection. Between Dia and the mainland the seabed drops quickly, which is why the water off Hersonissos stays clear to fifteen metres and why Hersonissos boat trips have always followed the same headlands. The limestone coast towards Malia and Stalis is undercut by small sea caves, some open to the air, and snorkelling reveals sponges, damselfish and the occasional amphora sherd on sand. The modern fleet reads the same water differently. Rigid-hulled jet boats take the headlands at speed and anchor for snorkelling; catamarans run wide to Dia for a full day; glass-bottom hulls hold the shallows so passengers can watch the seagrass without entering it; small self-drive boats let visitors trace the coves alone. Each is a different reading of one coastline. Hersonissos Port, Crete, Greece remains the single point of departure, as it was for Lyttos, and the daily rhythm of the quay is still set by weather from the north. Demand for Jet Boat Hersonissos Crete tickets is only the newest traffic across an anchorage that has been in continuous use for more than two thousand years. The fish tanks, cut for a Roman table, are still there under the keels.