Map of the Greek islands: the six groups that decide your trip

The islands

The six island groups, and what each one commits you to

Greece divides its islands into six groups plus Crete, which is large enough to be treated as a region of its own. The grouping is not decorative. It follows the ferry networks and the airports, so choosing a group is really choosing how you arrive, how long the journey takes and what else you can reach once you are there. Pick the island first and you can end up with a five hour transfer you did not budget for.

The six groups side by side

The same six, compressed into the four things that separate them. Travel times are for the fast ferry or the direct flight, outside the days either side of 15 August when the whole country moves at once.

Which groups combine, and which do not

Two islands can look like neighbours on a map of Greece and still have no boat between them. Ferry routes radiate out of Athens instead of joining the groups sideways, which is why the answer nearly always comes down to the group rather than the distance. These are the pairings people ask about.

Where the islands people name actually are

If you arrived here after seeing one island on a hotel page, this is the line you want. It places the island in its group, which tells you the rest.

Zante and Zakynthos are the same island, which trips people up on booking sites: Zante is the Venetian name and still the one the airlines use. Kefalonia is sometimes spelled Cephalonia, and Corfu is Kerkyra on Greek timetables. The three of them belong to the green group on the west coast, within sight of each other, and none of them is anywhere near the white villages most people picture when they say Greek islands.

The islands people are actually picturing

Those three are worth separating properly, because the names shift on booking sites. Shipwreck Beach sits on the north-west cliffs of the southernmost of them, an hour's drive and then a boat from the resorts most people book, which is the standard disappointment of a Zante week. Kerkyra, at the top of the chain, is the one with the Venetian old town and the 3 km channel to Albania. And the runway on Kefalonia sits near Argostoli in the south, so the drive up to Fiskardo at the far tip takes an hour and a half whatever the hotel photograph implies.

The ports and airports that do the work

Athens has three ferry ports, not one, and the difference matters when you land at 6 pm with a boat at 7.30. Piraeus is the big one, half an hour by metro from the centre, and it serves the Cyclades, the Saronic islands, Crete, the Dodecanese and the North Aegean. Rafina is smaller, closer to the airport than to the city, and it runs to Andros, Tinos, Mykonos, Naxos and Paros. Lavrio is further south and handles a short list of Cyclades routes.

The Ionian islands use none of them. Corfu goes from Igoumenitsa on the north-west coast, Zakynthos and Kefalonia from Kyllini in the Peloponnese, Ithaca from Patras. All three are four to six hours from Athens by road, which is why almost everyone flies into Corfu, Kefalonia, Zakynthos or Preveza instead. The Sporades work the same way from Volos and Agios Konstantinos on the east coast, which is why a Skiathos trip is usually flown rather than sailed.

Piraeus is the busiest passenger port in Europe and the gates run from E1 to E12 along about two kilometres of quay, so the gate number on your ticket is not a detail. Give yourself an hour if you are arriving by metro in August.

One gate out of twelve

The Dodecanese skip Athens altogether for most visitors, because Rhodes and Kos both take direct flights from northern Europe well into the autumn. They are laid out very differently, though. Rhodes puts its walled medieval town at one end and Lindos 50 km down the east coast, so the choice of resort decides how much driving your week contains. Kos is a 45 km strip you can ride a bike along, with the town at the eastern tip and the beaches at the other end, and KGS dropped in the middle of the island about 25 km from either, which is the one transfer worth checking before you book.

How many Greek islands are there, really

The figure you see quoted is 6,000, which counts every rock and islet in Greek territorial waters. Count only what has a name and a coastline of any size and you land nearer 1,200. Around 227 have permanent residents, and of those maybe 80 have an airport, a scheduled ferry or enough rooms to show up on a booking site. So the map that matters is much smaller than the number suggests.

Crete accounts for a quarter of the island land area on its own, at 8,336 km², and holds mountains above 2,400 m. Evia, the second largest, is joined to the mainland by a bridge at Chalkida and barely registers as an island to the people who live there. After those two the drop is steep: Rhodes, Lesbos, Chios, Kefalonia and Corfu are the only others above 600 km².

Reading the map before you book

Three checks catch most of the trouble. Find your island on the map above and note which group it belongs to. Check whether the second island on your list is in the same group, and if it is not, look for the pairing in the table further up before assuming a boat exists. Then check which Athens port your route uses, because Piraeus and Rafina are an hour apart in traffic and the ticket does not always say which one you want.

The group answers the rest on its own. It tells you which airport the cheap flights land at, whether the boat runs in May, and how many islands you can sensibly fit into ten days. Skip the check and the usual outcome is a taxi across Athens at seven in the morning to a port that was never on your ticket.