Santorini map: the caldera side and the beach side

The island

The whole island fits in 18 km north to south and never gets wider than 6 km. Oia is at the top of the crescent, Fira at the middle of its inner edge, and the long black beaches of Kamari and Perissa are down the outside where the land finally reaches the water. Nea Kameni, the dark lump in the middle of the bay, is the volcano itself, still growing.

The caldera side and the east coast

This is the only decision on Santorini that is hard to undo once booked. The two sides of the island are fifteen minutes apart by car and belong to different holidays at different prices. What separates them is the ground itself.

The gap in price is wider than the gap in distance. A rim terrace in Oia or Imerovigli runs at roughly three times what the same room fetches in Kamari or Perissa in the same July week, and the cheapest way to sleep on the caldera is to drop one village along the path rather than to drop a star rating. We compare where to sleep on each side of the rim if you want the numbers before you commit to one.

Why one side is a cliff and the other is a beach

Around 1600 BC the volcano that stood here emptied itself and collapsed into the hole it had left. The sea poured in. What survived is the outer wall of the mountain, sliced open on the inside, which is why the west coast is a raw face of lava and pumice and the east coast is the gentle outer flank of a cone. The rim villages are built on the cut edge, and the vineyards are on the slope behind them.

West to east, in section

This is also why the sunset is such an industry here. The rim faces west across open water with nothing in the way, and a few thousand people crowd the same corner of Oia every evening. Imerovigli and Firostefani face the same sun from the same rim, ten minutes down the path, with a fraction of the crowd.

How long everything actually takes

Santorini is small enough that visitors assume distances are trivial, then lose an hour to a road built for donkeys. These are times outside July and August, when the Fira to Oia stretch and the port road both seize up. Two arrival points sit on opposite coasts and are easy to mix up: the runway is over at Monolithos on the east side, a flat 15 minute run into Fira, while the ferry quay is under the cliff on the west.

Athinios deserves its own warning. The ferry port is a concrete shelf at the bottom of the cliff with one road out, and that road climbs the wall in switchbacks wide enough for a bus if nothing is coming the other way. When a large ferry unloads, several hundred cars, a dozen coaches and every hotel transfer on the island try to use it at once. Twenty minutes to Fira becomes fifty, and the taxi rank has around thirty cars for the whole island. Arrange the pickup before you sail.

The one road out

Car, bus, or neither

Every route on the island passes through Fira, including the buses, which run from the station behind the main square out to Oia, Kamari, Perissa, Akrotiri and the port. In summer the frequent ones go every half hour and the rest a handful of times a day, which covers a beach holiday but not an evening in a hill village.

A car is genuinely optional here in a way it is not on Crete or Rhodes. If you are on the rim, walking and the bus will cover most of a week, and parking in Oia is close to impossible: the village is pedestrian, the two car parks fill by ten in the morning, and in August people abandon cars along the main road half a kilometre out. If you are on the east coast and want the wineries, Ancient Akrotiri and the lighthouse in the same trip, hire one for two days rather than seven.

The islands in the middle of the map

Three pieces of land sit inside the ring. Nea Kameni is the active cone, a black cinder heap whose summit crater is a 30 minute walk up from the landing stage, with no shade and no handrail. Palea Kameni, smaller and older, has the hot springs, which are a patch of warm rust-coloured water you swim into from the boat. Thirasia, the long island closing the west of the caldera, is the other half of the rim, cut off when the crater collapsed, and it has around 300 residents and one village on the cliff.

Inside the ring

Boats to all three leave from the Old Port below Fira and from Ammoudi below Oia. The standard afternoon run does the volcano, the springs and Thirasia, then holds position in the middle of the caldera for the sunset, which is the one place on the island where you see the whole rim lit at once.

Where Santorini is, and why it is also called Thira

On a map of Greece, Santorini sits at the southern edge of the Cyclades, roughly 200 km south-east of Athens and 120 km north of Crete. Ios and Naxos are the islands above it, and below it there is nothing but open water until the Cretan coast. The rest of the group runs north from here, which is what makes the island a starting point as often as a destination. The flight from Athens takes 45 minutes, the fast ferry about 5 hours, the conventional one closer to 8.

That position also explains the three ways most people arrive by sea. The long one is the boat down from Piraeus, which is the cheap overnight option or the expensive fast one depending on which hull you book. The short one is the two hour run south from Mykonos, almost entirely on high-speed catamarans that feel every swell. And the crossing up from Heraklion is the one to treat with suspicion, because it is a single exposed leg across open water and is the first sailing on the board to be cancelled when the meltemi blows. To see how the Cyclades sit against the Dodecanese and the Ionian, the groups are laid out side by side here.

The second name causes more confusion than it should. Thira is the official Greek name, which is why the airport code is JTR and why road signs and ferry boards say Thira rather than Santorini. Santorini came later, from the Venetians, after Santa Irini. And the capital village is Fira, the same word worn down in local speech. Thira the island, Fira the town, Santorini the label on the postcard, one crescent of rock.