Milos hotels: the village you book decides the island you get

The places you can actually stay, side by side

Milos is shaped like a horseshoe around an enormous flooded crater, and almost everything sits on the northern arm of it. Distances look small on paper. They are not small in practice, because the roads follow the terrain and the terrain is volcanic.

Which base suits the trip you have booked

Four questions settle this for nearly everyone: are you driving, are you travelling as a couple, do you want to swim from the doorstep, and does the evening view matter. The single biggest mistake on Milos is booking a beautiful room in an isolated cove and then discovering that dinner is a twenty-minute drive on an unlit road, which is a different holiday from the one that was imagined.

Adamas: the port, and where the boats leave from

Adamas is where the ferry from Piraeus docks, and it is the least photogenic place on Milos. It is also the one that solves the most problems. The hire desks are here, the supermarkets are here, the bus that serves the island starts here, and the town is flat enough to walk with luggage. Rooms range from plain studios a street back from the water to the more expensive things along the seafront, which is why it holds more of the island's accommodation than anywhere else.

Which boat you are on decides how much that matters. Milos sits on the western Cyclades line rather than the busy central one, so the conventional ferry is a long haul and the fast catamaran is not an everyday service. A slow sailing can put you on the quay at Adamas well after dark, and on that arrival a room you can walk to with a bag in each hand is worth more than a view, because Pollonia is another twenty minutes away on an unlit road.

There is a second reason to consider it that has nothing to do with convenience. Kleftiko cannot be reached by road, only by boat, and the boats leave from Adamas with a smaller number going from Pollonia. The white sea stacks and caves on the south-west coast are the image that sold you the island, and getting there means a full day at sea around the bottom of Milos. Staying at the port means walking to the quay in the morning rather than driving to it and finding somewhere to leave the car.

Pollonia: the fishing village that turned into the couples' choice

Pollonia is at the north-eastern tip of Milos, twenty minutes from the port, facing Kimolos across a narrow strait. It was a fishing hamlet within living memory and it still looks like one from the water: a curve of small houses, tamarisk trees leaning over the sand, boats pulled up at one end. What has changed is what is behind them. This is where the island eats best, by a distance, and where the small design-minded hotels and studios have gone up rather than in Adamas.

The consequence is predictable. Pollonia is the most expensive corner of Milos and the first to fill, and in July and August it fills months rather than weeks in advance. The village is also small enough to walk end to end in ten minutes, which is either the appeal or the limitation depending on how long you are staying. Beyond a week, the lack of anything else within walking distance starts to show.

Plaka and Trypiti: the view, and hardly any beds

The Chora is up on the ridge above Adamas, and it is really two villages that run into each other. Plaka is the higher and the prettier, a knot of whitewashed lanes with a church on a rock at the top that the whole island climbs to at sunset. Trypiti is its quieter neighbour, strung along the crest with restored windmills, the Roman theatre and the early Christian catacombs below it, and a footpath down to the sea at Klima.

Both are wonderful to stay in and neither has much to offer. These are lived-in villages rather than resorts, so the accommodation is a scattering of guesthouses and rented houses rather than hotels, and what exists goes early. Cars stop at the edge of Plaka and the rest is steps, which matters if you are arriving off the ferry with two suitcases. Nothing here is near a beach either. You will drive to swim, every day.

Provatas and Paleochori: sleeping on the beach, driving for everything else

The south coast is the sheltered one. The meltemi blows out of the north all summer, so when Sarakiniko and Pollonia are being sandblasted, Provatas and Paleochori are calm. That is the case for staying down here, along with the obvious one of walking out of your room onto the sand. Provatas is a short shallow crescent that suits families. Paleochori is longer, more dramatic, backed by coloured cliffs, with sand hot enough at one end that the local taverna once cooked in it.

The case against is the same for both. There is no village behind either beach, so dinner is whatever taverna is open and everything else is a drive. The road from Adamas is fine and the trip takes fifteen or twenty minutes, but it goes both ways and it is dark at night. Base yourself here if the plan is to swim, read and stay put. Do not base yourself here if the plan is to see the island.

The syrmata: sleeping in a fisherman's boathouse

The most characteristic thing you can rent on Milos barely appears in English at all. The syrmata are the boathouses cut into the rock at the waterline in coves such as Klima, Mandrakia, Firopotamos and Fourkovouni, with wide painted doors at sea level where the boat was winched in for the winter and a room or two above it for the family. The doors are painted every colour there is, which is why photographs of Klima appear on every article about the island, usually without anyone mentioning that people live behind them.

Syrmata

A few have been converted and are let out, and staying in one is the closest thing Milos has to a signature. They were built for boats rather than for people, so expect low ceilings, steps straight down into the sea, and a cove with no shop, no bus and nowhere obvious to leave a car. The number available is tiny and demand for them is not, so this is the category to decide on first and book around, rather than the one to look at last.

Why Milos books out earlier than islands twice its size

Milos is not short of rooms because it is exclusive. It is short of rooms because it spent the twentieth century mining bentonite and perlite rather than building hotels, and the visitors arrived faster than the beds did. The season is compressed too, running from around May to early October with a hard peak in the two summer months, and the western ferry line that serves the island has fewer sailings than the routes to Mykonos or Santorini, and how thin the sailings from Piraeus really are is the other half of the same planning problem, since the boat you can get often decides the nights you can book.

In practice that means the room search on Milos behaves differently from the one on a bigger island. Booking two months out for August will show you a thin, expensive list rather than a choice, and it will not improve as the date approaches. Decide on the village first using the table above, then take what is available in it, rather than filtering by price across the whole island and ending up somewhere you did not intend to stay.

One last thing worth settling before you book anything. Nothing on this island works properly without a vehicle unless you have deliberately chosen a base that removes the need, and hire cars and quads on Milos come from a handful of local firms with small fleets that empty out weeks ahead in high summer. Reserve the vehicle at the same time as the room, not afterwards. If you want to see how the villages sit relative to each other before you commit, the our drawings of the islands place them against each other in about a minute.