Fira Santorini is the island’s capital, its transport hub and the place most first-time visitors should base themselves, and it is also the town people are most often rude about. Both reactions are earned. Between eleven and five in high…
Thirassia Santorini is the island you have been looking at all week without knowing its name. It is the long dark shape across the water from Oia and Imerovigli, the western wall of the same volcano, separated from the main…
Santorini weather is simpler than most destinations and stranger in one respect: the temperature matters far less than the wind. Visitors arrive braced for heat, which is real and manageable, and are caught out by a northerly that cancels their…
The crossing from Santorini to Naxos is one of the easiest in the Cyclades and one of the most useful. It takes between ninety minutes and three and a half hours depending on the vessel, it runs several times a…
Santorini museums are small, cheap and almost entirely overlooked, which is a shame because two of them hold objects that would headline a national collection anywhere else. The frescoes lifted from Akrotiri are among the finest surviving wall paintings of…
The crossing from Santorini to Mykonos is the busiest island hop in the Cyclades, and for most of the year it is genuinely simple: a high speed ferry, two to three hours, several sailings a day. The complications are all…
Santorini villas divide into two very different products that share a word. On the caldera rim, a villa usually means a cave suite cut into the cliff with a terrace and a plunge pool, sleeping two to four, priced accordingly.…
Santorini in winter is a genuinely different island, and whether that is wonderful or disappointing depends almost entirely on what you came for. The caldera is still there, the villages are still white against the cliff, and the light in…
Deciding where to stay in Santorini matters more here than on almost any other Greek island, because the place is really two islands joined by a ridge. On one side a cliff of villages above a flooded volcano, expensive and…
The single most useful fact about the Santorini taxi system is how small it is. The island has a famously limited fleet, licensed in numbers that made sense decades ago and never expanded to match the visitor numbers, which means…