Santorini

Santorini is the most photographed island in Greece, and in July and August it feels exactly that crowded. Come in late April or October instead, when the cruise ships are fewer and the light over the caldera has its clear winter quality.

A single event gave the island its shape. Around 1600 BC the volcano collapsed, leaving the caldera, the great basin below the cliffs. The eruption killed a Minoan civilisation that had built plumbing and houses of several storeys. Its buried city, Akrotiri, survives beneath the volcanic ash and is the reason to come, even if you skip the views. Some scholars argue that the eruption is the source of Plato’s Atlantis story. Nothing has been proved.

The local grape, Assyrtiko, is trained low to the ground in woven basket shapes called kouloura, which shelter the fruit from the Meltemi wind. It makes a dry white wine with an unusual mineral taste. A few hours at the wineries on the flat eastern half of the island balance a day on the cliffs. The volcanic soil also explains the cherry tomatoes and white aubergines on every taverna menu.

Two practical decisions matter. If you want to sleep, stay in Imerovigli or the quieter end of Oia, not Fira. Book the caldera sailing tour ahead, because demand is real. Two nights is the minimum, and three is better.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    A helicopter from Athens to JTR takes 60 to 75 minutes on a twin-engine charter, and AEGEANVIP and Ariston Aviation handle the route. The first cruise tenders reach Skala below Fira at 9am, and the caldera, the sea-filled crater of the volcano, fills with people behind them. Book any cliff-edge experience for before that hour or after 5.30pm, when the day boats have turned for home and the light is going gold.

  2. The address

    Grace Hotel at Imerovigli, with 20 rooms in the Auberge Resorts Collection, is the most measured of the addresses on the caldera edge. For larger parties there is Mystique at Oia (Luxury Collection) or Canaves Oia, built around a 17th-century cave. Andronis Boutique Hotel at Oia suits a guest who wants Lauda’s kitchen on site.

  3. The kitchens

    Selene in Fira, founded in 1985, is now under chef Ettore Botrini in the rooms of an 18th-century Catholic monastery. Lauda at Andronis Boutique Hotel in Oia, the village’s first restaurant since 1971, draws on the counsel of chef Emmanuel Renaut, while Metaxi Mas at Exo Gonia is the locals’ choice, for goat with lemon potatoes and fava, a split-pea purée, with caramelised onions. None of the three takes walk-ins in summer.

  4. The wineries

    Domaine Sigalas, on the plain near Oia, is the Assyrtiko benchmark, under KIR-YIANNI ownership since December 2025. Estate Argyros at Episkopi Gonia, established in 1903 and run by the fourth generation, is the Vinsanto cellar; Gaia at Exo Gonia makes Thalassitis, the 1994 single-varietal that put Santorini on the world list; and Hatzidakis at Pyrgos Kallistis, the island’s certified organic estate, is built into a cave below the family vineyard. Tutored tastings book a week ahead.

  5. Akrotiri

    Allow 60 to 90 minutes at Akrotiri, under its modern shelter. In summer it opens on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 8am to 8pm and on Monday and Thursday from 8.30am to 3.30pm, and it is closed on Tuesday. The frescoes themselves are in the Thera Gallery of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, with companion pieces at the Museum of Prehistoric Thira in Fira.

  6. Skaros

    Skaros, west of Imerovigli, is a 13th-century Venetian castle that served as the medieval capital of Thera and at its peak held some 200 houses on the rock. The earthquakes that came with the volcanic activity of 1650 and 1701 to 1711 broke its structure, and the last residents had moved to Imerovigli and Fira by the early 1800s. The walk from Imerovigli to the rock and on to the Theoskepasti chapel on its seaward side takes about an hour there and back, the final stretch cut into the stone.

  7. The Tomato Industrial Museum

    The Nomikos cannery at Vlychada, named for Dimitrios Nomikos, who founded the family’s first tomato factory on the island in 1915, worked from 1945 and reopened as an industrial museum in 2014. It opens Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm, with last entry at 5.30pm, and is closed on Monday and from December to March. The exhibition follows the tomato from seed to paste, the backbone of the south coast’s industry before tourism.

  8. Megalochori

    Megalochori is a 17th-century wine-merchant village on the southwest plain, founded by the families who ran the trade in Vinsanto, the island’s sweet wine, before the cooperatives. Its maze of lanes holds captain’s houses, traditional cave houses and neoclassical mansions, with canavas, the half-buried wine cellars cut into the volcanic tuff, still folded among them. It remains the quietest of the inhabited settlements, and mornings before 10am belong to the residents rather than the coach trade.

  9. First light at Pyrgos

    Pyrgos is the highest village on the island, with cobbled lanes climbing to the Venetian Kasteli, the castle of 1580, at the summit. The 6.30am walk through its empty alleys is the alternative to Oia at sunset: the same caldera, the volcano backlit rather than silhouetted, the ridge to the rest of the island held in a single view, and no other guests yet on the road.

  10. Profitis Ilias

    The monastery of Profitis Ilias, founded in 1711 by the monks Joachim and Gabriel, stands on the southeastern peak at 565 metres, the highest point on the island, and ran a Greek-language school under the Ottomans. Its museum is in the former Agia Triada chapel in Pyrgos, with rare Byzantine icons and the manuscripts the monastery taught from.

Anchorage Notes

  1. Vlychada

    Vlychada, on the south coast, is the harbour the Municipal Port Fund of Thira, the island’s port authority, keeps for private craft. Its fishing sanctuary also takes visiting boats for mooring and docking, with water, electricity, waste service and the means to lift a hull out and launch it. It takes pleasure craft up to 20 metres, and a chartered yacht lies here rather than among the ferries at Athinios.

  2. Athinios

    Athinios is Santorini’s commercial and passenger port, built between 2006 and 2008, and the arrival point for everyone who comes by sea: the conventional and high-speed ferries from Piraeus, Rafina, the Cyclades, Crete and the Dodecanese all run here. A chartered guest passes through it by car rather than by tender (the yacht’s small boat), and a yacht leaves its traffic to the ferries.

  3. The caldera

    The old port below Fira, called Skala, is a tender port and little else. Cruise ships lie in the middle of the caldera, the sea-filled crater of the volcano, and send their passengers ashore by launch, and from the quay the cable car climbs 220 metres to the capital, beside the 587 steps and the donkey path. The Port Fund runs both the bay of Fira and the cable car.

  4. Ammoudi

    Ammoudi is the port below Oia, and the Municipal Port Fund of Thira names it as one of the island’s three principal harbours, with Athinios and the bay of Fira. It lies at the foot of the cliff the village stands on, as Oia’s own landing on the northern rim of the caldera, and its water is worked by the local boats; the ferries do not reach it.

  5. Korfos

    Korfos is the little port of Thirasia, the island that closes the caldera opposite Oia, about a mile across the water. Its waterfront of traditional tavernas welcomes the visitors who cross from Santorini, and above it stands Manolas, the island’s capital, with Riva as the other landing. Thirasia is Santorini as it was two generations ago, and a tender reaches it at Korfos.