🇬🇷 Greece · Cyclades
Few places on the planet have an image as recognisable as Santorini: blindingly white villages hanging from the edge of a cliff, church domes painted blue, windmills and, behind it all, the enormous flooded crater of a volcanic caldera dropping sheer into a sea of impossible blue. That crescent of land is what was left after one of the greatest eruptions in human history, the Minoan eruption some 3,600 years ago, which blew away the centre of the island and shaped this unique landscape. Walking through Firá or Oia at sunset, with the sun sinking into the Aegean, is one of those experiences that on their own justify a trip to Greece.
But it is worth arriving with your expectations calibrated: Santorini is also one of the most crowded destinations in the Mediterranean. In high summer, tens of thousands of people — many of them off the cruise ships — pack the same lanes and the same viewpoints, above all for the famous Oia sunset, which can feel more like a stadium concert than a romantic moment. In response, from 2025 the Greek authorities imposed a daily cap on cruise passengers and a landing tax for cruise ships, in an attempt to curb overtourism. The key to enjoying it is to get up early, get out of the two star villages and look for the quieter corners inland.
This guide covers Santorini with a practical eye: how to arrive by plane or by ferry, how to get around an island where taxis are scarce, what to see beyond the postcard — the Minoan site of Akrotiri, the 'Pompeii of the Aegean'; the red and black volcanic sand beaches; Ancient Thera; the volcano and its hot springs — where to try the assyrtiko wine born of this land of ash, and how to dodge the crowds so you keep the best of this one-of-a-kind island.
The history of Santorini is branded by its volcano. Around 1600 BC, an enormous eruption — the Minoan eruption of Thera — blew away the centre of the island, sank its central part beneath the sea and created the present caldera. That catastrophe buried under metres of ash the prosperous Minoan town of Akrotiri, whose two-storey houses and astonishing frescoes were preserved intact, and it is thought to have contributed to the decline of the Minoan civilisation of Crete through earthquakes and tsunamis. Centuries later that cataclysm fed the speculation that Santorini may have inspired Plato's myth of Atlantis, an attractive hypothesis but without firm support. Colonised by the Dorians, it had its ancient city at Ancient Thera; it passed through Roman and Byzantine hands, and in the Middle Ages the Venetians fortified it and gave it the name of Saint Irene (Santorini). A devastating earthquake in 1956 ruined much of the island and caused heavy emigration, until from the following decades tourism turned it into the global icon it is today. The full story 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.
Santorini is no ordinary island: it is the scar of one of the greatest natural catastrophes in human history. Before that catastrophe there was a more or less round island, known in antiquity as Strongyle ('the round one'), with a large volcano at its centre. Around 1600 BC — the dates range between 1650 and 1500 BC, a scientific debate still open — that volcano produced the so-called Minoan eruption of Thera, a colossal explosion with a volcanic explosivity index (VEI) of 7, one of the most violent of the last few thousand years.
The eruption threw out on the order of 30 to 40 cubic kilometres of rock and ash, emptied the magma chamber and caused the centre of the island to collapse beneath the sea, forming the present caldera: that enormous flooded crater, some 12 kilometres long, ringed by cliffs up to 300 metres high on which the white villages look out today. What we see as an idyllic landscape is in fact the edge of an enormous geological wound.
The effects were devastating far beyond the island itself. Columns of ash covered the Aegean, and the associated earthquakes and tsunamis struck the coasts of the neighbouring islands and of northern Crete, a little over 100 kilometres away. Many researchers link that eruption to the weakening of the Minoan civilisation of Crete, the brilliant culture of the palaces of Knossos and Phaistos, which went into decline in the following centuries, though today it is understood that its fall was a more complex and drawn-out process, not a single fatal blow. The volcano, in any case, never fully went out: it stayed active in later periods, forming the black islands at the centre of the caldera (Palea and Nea Kameni) in historical eruptions, and it is still monitored today.
Beneath the ash of that eruption an extraordinary town was buried. At Akrotiri, in the south of the island, there was a prosperous Bronze Age settlement linked to Minoan culture, a flourishing port trading with Crete, mainland Greece, Egypt and the Near East. The volcanic ash covered it and preserved it almost miraculously, as Vesuvius would do with Pompeii more than fifteen hundred years later.
The excavations, begun in 1967 by the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos, brought to light cobbled streets, squares, a sophisticated drainage system and two- and three-storey houses with walls decorated by frescoes of astonishing vividness: ships, dolphins, antelopes, lilies, boys boxing, scenes of a refined society. One unsettling and revealing detail: no human remains or objects of great value were found among the ruins, which suggests the inhabitants had time to evacuate, probably warned by the earthquakes that preceded the eruption. The original frescoes are kept today in the Museum of Prehistoric Thera, in Firá, and in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
That image of an advanced civilisation suddenly swallowed by the sea fed one of the most seductive theories about Santorini: that the eruption and the disappearance of Minoan culture may have inspired the myth of Atlantis, the island-continent that, according to the philosopher Plato, flourished and sank beneath the waters in a single day. Marinatos himself defended that hypothesis. It is worth being clear, however: this is speculation, not proven fact. Plato placed his Atlantis in the Atlantic and in a far more remote age, and there is no evidence directly connecting his account with Thera; most specialists consider Atlantis a philosophical allegory rather than the memory of a real place. The coincidence is suggestive and part of the island's charm, but it belongs to the realm of legend, not archaeology.
Once the catastrophe had passed, life slowly returned to the island. Around the 9th century BC, Dorian settlers established themselves there and founded their classical city high on Mount Mesa Vouno, a defensible, windy spot with views of both coasts: Ancient Thera. According to tradition, the island took its name from the leader of those settlers, Theras. Ancient Thera lived its centuries of splendour in Hellenistic and Roman times, with temples, an agora, a theatre overlooking the precipice and baths, whose ruins can still be walked today.
Through antiquity and the Byzantine period, the island was a secondary but stable point on the map of the Aegean, populated by farmers, fishermen and sailors. The present name, Santorini, is not ancient Greek but medieval: it comes from Saint Irene (Santa Irini), the dedication of a church on the island, and it was given by the Latin sailors who frequented these waters in the late Middle Ages.
After the Fourth Crusade and the dismembering of the Byzantine Empire in 1204, Santorini fell into the orbit of the Venetians, who ruled much of the Cyclades through the Duchy of Naxos. The Latin lords raised fortresses — the kastra — in several villages to defend against the pirates who plagued the Aegean: in Pyrgos, Emporio, Skaros and Oia, remains of those medieval fortifications survive, along with a street layout designed for defence, with clustered houses and labyrinthine lanes. In 1579 the island passed into the hands of the Ottoman Empire, under whose rule it remained, with notable autonomy and an active merchant fleet, until the Greek War of Independence of the 1820s, after which it became part of the new Greek state.
The 20th century brought Santorini a new shock, this time seismic. In the early hours of 9 July 1956, an extremely violent earthquake of magnitude close to 7.7 — with its epicentre between Amorgos and Santorini — struck the island and its surroundings. It was one of the greatest quakes in Europe in the whole century. The tremor was followed by a tsunami, and the result in Santorini was catastrophic: hundreds of houses collapsed, dozens dead and injured, and much of the villages on the caldera rim — Firá, Oia, Imerovigli — reduced to rubble.
The consequences went far beyond the fallen buildings. The island, already impoverished and with a fragile economy based on wine, tomatoes and farming on difficult soil, was left devastated, and thousands of people emigrated in the years that followed: they left for Athens, for other parts of Greece and abroad (the United States, Australia) in search of a future the island, in ruins, did not seem able to offer. The population of Santorini collapsed, many villages were left half abandoned and their empty houses gradually decayed. For a couple of decades Santorini was an island in retreat, associated more with depopulation than with the luxury tourism that defines it today.
The transformation of Santorini from a declining island into one of the most famous and coveted destinations in the world is one of the most striking stories of reinvention in the Mediterranean, and it happened in just a few decades. From the 1960s and 1970s, and more strongly from the 1980s, tourism began to arrive, drawn by something that until then had been seen as simply a postcard: the unique landscape of the caldera, the white villages hanging from the cliff and sunsets like no others. Many of those cave houses left empty by emigration were restored and turned into boutique hotels and luxury suites with infinity pools looking over the crater.
Since then, Santorini has established itself as a byword for romance and for the Cyclades in the global imagination: a honeymoon destination, the setting for countless photographs and advertising campaigns, and a compulsory stop for the great cruise ships touring the Aegean. Assyrtiko wine, born of its volcanic vineyards trained in basket shapes, gained international standing and added another draw. The island, which in the 1950s was pushing its children out, came to receive several million visitors a year.
That success brought its own shadow, however: overcrowding. In high summer, tens of thousands of people — many of them cruise passengers coming ashore for a few hours — concentrate in Firá and above all in Oia, blocking its narrow lanes and its viewpoints, with the sunset turned into a mass experience. On record days more than 17,000 cruise passengers have arrived in a single day. In the face of this overtourism, from 2025 the Greek authorities adopted concrete measures: a daily cap of about 8,000 cruise passengers and a landing tax for cruise passengers (higher in summer, lower in winter), in an attempt to ease the pressure on a small and fragile island. At the same time, monitoring the volcano — which is still active — and managing tourism are the great challenges of a Santorini that today is caught between remaining the dazzling icon of Greece and not dying of its own success.