🇬🇷 Greece · Cyclades
Mykonos is the Greek island that appears on the jet set's postcards: white windmills cut out against the Aegean, whitewashed lanes to lose yourself in among bougainvillea, tiny blue-domed churches and, as evening falls, Little Venice with its houses leaning over the sea and the sky turning pink. It is pure glamour, legendary nightlife and beaches where the party never stops. But Mykonos is also, and it is worth saying plainly, one of the most expensive destinations in all of Greece: here you pay to be here.
The island has two faces living side by side. On one hand, the Mykonos of the south coast beach clubs — Paradise, Super Paradise, Psarou, Ornos — with very expensive sunbeds, music at full volume and a scene that draws celebrities and people who want to feel like celebrities. On the other, a calmer and more genuine Mykonos: quiet, wild beaches in the north, the inland village of Ano Mera with its monastery, family tavernas and, above all, the neighbouring island of Delos, one of the most important archaeological sites in the Mediterranean, the mythical birthplace of the god Apollo.
This guide covers Mykonos with a practical, honest eye: what to see beyond the party, how to organise the trip to Delos, which beaches to choose depending on what you want, how to get around an island with no metro and, very importantly, how to understand the prices so the bill does not ruin your holiday. Because Mykonos dazzles, yes, but it rewards the traveller who knows where they stand: when to pay for the show and when to slip away to an empty cove and watch the sunset for free.
Mykonos takes its name, according to myth, from Mykons, a local hero descended from Apollo. But its real historical importance lies opposite, on the tiny island of Delos, which tradition names as the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis and which was the great panhellenic sanctuary of the Aegean, seat of the Delian League in the 5th century BC and, later, one of the largest slave markets in the Roman world. Mykonos, a poor and rocky island, lived in the shadow of that sanctuary and then of piracy, trade and seafaring. Under Venetian and later Ottoman rule, its people became famous sailors. In the Greek War of Independence of 1821 the island played a heroic part through Manto Mavrogenous, an aristocrat who funded ships with her fortune. In the 20th century, after centuries of poverty, international jet set tourism discovered it in the 1960s and turned it into the glamorous icon it is today. The full story, with Delos at its centre, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The white archipelago of the Aegean: cradle of the enigmatic Bronze Age Cycladic culture, with the sacred island of Delos where Apollo was born, the Santorini split apart by the greatest eruption of antiquity and the centuries of Venetian rule in the Duchy of Naxos.
Read the history of Cyclades →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Mykonos you have to look opposite, at a bare, tiny rock that today has no permanent inhabitants: Delos. Because the great history of this corner of the Aegean was not written by the party island but by its sacred neighbour. According to Greek myth, the titaness Leto, hounded by Hera's jealousy, could find no land willing to receive her so she could give birth to the children she was expecting by Zeus. Only Delos, a wandering and barren island, agreed to take her in, and there, clinging to a palm tree beside Mount Kynthos, Leto gave birth to the twins Artemis and Apollo. In return, the island was anchored to the sea floor and consecrated forever to the god of light. That story made Delos one of the most sacred places in the Greek world.
Archaeology confirms a very ancient occupation: there were settlements as early as the third millennium BC, and by the 9th–8th century BC Delos was a cult centre of the first rank. From very early on it was the common sanctuary of the Ionians, who came on pilgrimage to honour Apollo with festivals, song and competitions. Because it was holy ground, successive 'purifications' were decreed in the 6th century BC: it was forbidden to be born or to die on the island, and graves were even exhumed and moved so that no body would defile the god's soil. That aura of ritual purity accompanied Delos throughout antiquity and explains why, even today, staying overnight there is forbidden.
Mykonos, the large rocky island next door, was tied to Delos from the start as its larder and its rear guard. Poor in fertile land, it lived in the shadow of the sanctuary, supplying the pilgrims and priests. Its own name, by tradition, comes from Mykons, a local hero said to be descended from Apollo. The fate of the two islands was joined for centuries.
The moment of greatest political weight for Delos came after the Persian Wars, when the Greek cities threw back the invasion of the Persian Empire. In 478 BC, shortly after the Greek victories at Salamis and Plataea, a group of city-states from the Aegean and Ionia joined in a military alliance to keep Persia at bay and free the Greeks still under its rule. That alliance is what history knows as the Delian League, because its seat, its assembly and — most important — its common treasury were installed in the sanctuary of Apollo on Delos, neutral and sacred ground everyone respected.
Each member city contributed ships or money, and those funds were kept in the temple of Apollo under the care of treasurers. On paper it was a league of equals; in practice Athens, the strongest naval power, gradually took command and turned the allies into subjects. The turning point came in 454 BC when, on the pretext of protecting the funds from a possible Persian attack, the Athenians moved the League's treasury from Delos to the Acropolis of Athens. It was a gesture loaded with meaning: historians consider it the moment when the Delian League stopped being an alliance and became, in fact, the Athenian Empire. With part of that money Pericles later financed the rebuilding of the Acropolis and the construction of the Parthenon.
Delos was thus stripped of its political role, though its religious prestige remained intact. For the rest of the classical period it stayed a revered sanctuary, disputed and controlled by Athens, which ordered new purifications and organised festivals in honour of Apollo. The small sacred island had been, for a few decades, the financial heart of the Greek world.
After the decline of Athens and the rise of the Hellenistic kingdoms, Delos lived a second life, very different from the first. In 166 BC Rome, by then master of the eastern Mediterranean, handed Delos to Athens but declared it a free port, exempt from taxes. That measure turned the sacred island into one of the largest trading centres of the ancient world. Merchants from Italy, Syria, Egypt and all over the Aegean arrived at its harbour; whole quarters of houses with mosaics were built, along with temples to foreign gods, warehouses and merchants' guildhalls. The population shot up to tens of thousands of people.
The most lucrative business, and also the most sinister, was the slave trade. After Rome destroyed Corinth in 146 BC, Delos became the main slave market in the Mediterranean. The geographer Strabo claimed that up to ten thousand slaves could be sold there in a single day: the figure is certainly a rhetorical exaggeration, but it reflects the colossal scale of the human trafficking the island handled. Thousands of people captured in wars and raids were sold on Delos to supply slave labour to Roman Italy. That sanctuary of purity, where it was forbidden to be born or to die, had become the setting for the cruellest trade of its time.
The prosperity collapsed abruptly. In 88 BC, during the war between Rome and Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, the king's troops attacked Delos, an ally of Rome: they looted the temples, burned the town, killed or enslaved much of its population. A few years later, in 69 BC, the pirates who plagued the Aegean finished the job with another sack. Delos never recovered. It was gradually abandoned, its marble was used as a quarry for centuries and the island became the vast field of ruins that French archaeologists began to excavate at the end of the 19th century and that is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
While Delos faded, Mykonos followed its own path, always a modest one. In the Byzantine period it was a minor Aegean island, exposed to raids by Arab and Saracen pirates who made these waters a dangerous place. After the Fourth Crusade and the fall of Constantinople to the Latins in 1204, the Cyclades were shared out among Venetian lords. Mykonos passed into the hands of the Ghisi family, who around 1207 built a castle (the Kastro) in Chora for defence. From that medieval period comes the labyrinthine layout of the capital: its narrow, winding streets, which end in dead ends, were designed so that any attacker or pirate who came in would get lost, while the residents, who knew every turn, could defend themselves or escape.
In 1537 the fearsome Ottoman admiral Barbarossa laid waste to much of the Cyclades, and by the middle of the 16th century Mykonos had come under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, like almost all of Greece. The Ottomans governed at a distance and with a relatively loose hand: they collected taxes but left a degree of local autonomy. In that context the Mykonians became a people of skilful sailors and traders, and often smugglers and pirates too. Seafaring was for centuries the livelihood of an island poor in land: its ships crossed the Aegean trading from port to port, and more than a few captains built in Little Venice those houses leaning over the sea from which, it is said, they loaded and unloaded goods (legal or not) directly over the water.
That maritime economy explains many features of the Mykonos we see today: the windmills the Venetians multiplied to grind grain using the meltemi, the shipyards, the votive chapels sailors raised by the dozen to ask for protection or give thanks for coming back alive. It was a hard society, weathered by sea and wind, a long way from today's glamour.
When the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire broke out in 1821, the Aegean islands, with their merchant fleets turned overnight into warships, played a decisive part. Mykonos gave its fleet and its sailors to the cause, but above all it gave the revolution a legendary figure: Manto Mavrogenous. Born into a well-off family and educated in the ideas of the Enlightenment, this cultured and passionate woman embraced the cause of independence with total commitment. When an Ottoman squadron tried to land on Mykonos in 1822, Manto organised and led the islanders' resistance and managed to drive off the attack.
Mavrogenous did not stop at defending her island: she put her considerable family fortune at the service of the revolution. She armed and financed ships and bodies of troops that fought on various fronts in the Aegean and mainland Greece, spent her wealth on supplies and sustained the struggle financially until she was ruined. She ended the war a national heroine but poor, and died years later on the island of Paros, far from any honours. Her figure is today a symbol of the part women played in Greek independence, and her name is on squares and streets across the country.
With the recognition of Greek independence, sealed between 1828 and 1830 with the backing of the European powers, Mykonos became part of the new Greek state. But independence did not bring immediate prosperity: through the rest of the 19th century and much of the 20th, the island remained a poor and thinly populated place, dependent on fishing, on meagre farming and, above all, on emigration. Many Mykonians left for Athens, for the United States or for other ports in search of a better life. Nothing suggested what was to come.
The turn that transformed the poor sailors' island into today's glamorous Mykonos began, paradoxically, thanks to Delos. In the first decades of the 20th century, the archaeological excavations of the French School at Athens on the sacred island drew archaeologists, scholars and cultured travellers, who needed a nearby base to sleep and eat: that base was Mykonos. Little by little, the island made a name for itself among bohemians, artists and intellectuals who discovered the charm of its white Chora, its windmills and its light.
The great leap came in the 1950s and above all in the 1960s, when international jet set tourism set its sights on Mykonos. Film stars, millionaires, artists and celebrities began to frequent the island; one much-discussed visit was that of Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961. The combination of Cycladic beauty, a cosmopolitan atmosphere, tolerance and vibrant nightlife did the rest. Mykonos became a byword for glamour and freedom, and very early on it gained a reputation as an open, pioneering destination, one of the first places in the Mediterranean to welcome LGBT tourism as a matter of course, something that is still part of its identity.
Along with tourism, the island went through a radical economic transformation in a few decades: from emigration and poverty to being one of the richest and most expensive destinations in Greece. That prosperity has two sides. Today Mykonos receives every summer crowds that multiply its population by ten, with problems of saturation, runaway prices, pressure on the water supply and the debate over the 'sunbed wars' and the abusive occupation of the beaches. The island that lived a thousand years in the shadow of Apollo's sanctuary, and as many more of pirates and seafaring, is today a global icon of luxury and partying. And yet, anyone who steps away from the beach clubs can still find, in a lost chapel, in a windmill against the wind or in the silent ruins of Delos, the intact memory of everything it once was.