The essential Santorini facts: the island is the rim of a volcano that blew its centre into the sea around 1600 BC, the caldera water is 300 to 400 metres deep, the vines are ungrafted and grown in ash, and a Bronze Age town lies buried at Akrotiri. Santorini Tours is a local operator running private tours and transfers on the island.
5 Unique things about Santorini island
Santorini island is the most famous destination in Greece, visited by many tourists every year. On this island, man and nature live in harmony. Born from the fires of a volcano, today it is a land of sea and wind with hundred of villages that are worth visiting during your stay.
On Santorini, the charming island of the Aegean, there are not only pristine beaches but also the amazing sunsets and the renowned worldwide churches. Even if you have been there once, there is a wealth of new activities that you will have the opportunity to enjoy there. You will meet the Greek culture on amazing Santorini tours as you will see the volcano, walk the Caldera villages, see the sunset from Oia and taste local wines.
However, for those visiting Santorini for the first time there are many secrets awating to be revealed-Santorini captures the breathtaking beauty of the Greek islands.
1. The Entire Island is a Volcanic Rock
The Minoan eruption, one of the most famous volcanic eruptions in history took place in 1945 BC. As a result, after the eruptions that spanned hundred thousand years, created Santorini and other small islands.
The volcano would erupt, gradually filled with magma and create a new volcano that would erupt and repeat the process. These leftover bits of deep red lava formations and the turquoise Aegean waters create a breathtaking scenery that you will never forget.
2. In Santorini you will find hot springs
These hot springs are not very known. In Palia Kameni, the water is warm rich in sulphur and volcanic elements which are beneficial for the skin and the body. There, the water is significantly warmer and the colour changes from striking turquoise to murky yellow. Enjoy plunges and body-painting there.
3. You will find churces in the whole island
One element that makes Santorini famous is the churches with the blue rooftops. You have noticed this sceney in the majority of photos related to Santorini. Furthermore, churches adorn even the most impossible places you can imagine in Santorini. However, you will find the most famous blue rooftops in Oia and see the magnificent sunset in the evening.
4. Some people link Atlantis with Santorini
Many tourists believe that underneath the sea around the island of Santorini there are the ruins of Atlantis. This place was very attractive and many explorers searched for it. However, the history of these destinations are similar. Atlantis sunk under the sea because its people angered the gods. Santorini was created by many eruptions after hundred thousand years.
5. There are still after-effects of the tsunami
We can see the impacts of the tsunami generated by volcanic eruptions of Santorini on the Eastern Mediterranean. It is rumored that the world map might look differently had the Greek volcano Thera not erupted 3.500 years ago in what geologists believe was the most powerful eruption in history.
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- The top 5 Santorini Beaches
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Santorini Facts: The Short Version
The island is the rim of a volcano that blew its centre into the sea around 1600 BC. Everything else follows from that: the cliff, the villages on top of it, the black sand, the vines grown in ash and the sunset. If you want the santorini facts in one line, that is the line.
The rest of these santorini facts is the detail, and most of it surprises people who have only seen the photographs.
Geology and the Eruption
The island is still an active volcano. The last eruption was in 1950, at Nea Kameni in the middle of the caldera, and the system is monitored continuously, which is the first of the santorini facts most people find surprising.
The Minoan eruption happened between about 1620 and 1600 BC. The exact date is still argued over, because the radiocarbon evidence and the Egyptian historical chronology do not agree.
It ejected roughly 60 cubic kilometres of magma. That is the santorini facts figure that surprises geologists least and everybody else most, putting it among the largest volcanic events of the last ten thousand years, on the scale of Krakatoa in 1883 and probably larger.
Ash from it has been found in Greenland ice cores. And across the sea floor of the eastern Mediterranean.
It almost certainly caused a tsunami. Reaching Crete, a hundred kilometres to the south.
The eruption went in four phases. A plinian ash column, pyroclastic surges, a violent steam-driven phase when the sea broke in, and finally the collapse of the magma chamber roof, which created the caldera.
You can read the whole sequence in the cliff. Every coloured band on the road up from the old port is a separate eruption, and it is the most legible of all the santorini facts.
Nea Kameni is still growing. It first appeared above the water in the second century BC and has been added to by eruptions ever since.
The Caldera in Numbers
The caldera is about 12 kilometres by 7. Roughly 8 kilometres across at the widest point, and the scale is what the santorini facts in photographs never convey.
The water inside is 300 to 400 metres deep. Which is why no cruise ship can moor and they all anchor instead.
The cliff rises up to 300 metres. Almost vertically, from that water.
The highest point of the island is 567 metres. Profitis Ilias, in the southeast.
The island covers about 76 square kilometres. Fifty minutes end to end by car.
Four islands make up the group. Santorini itself, Thirasia, Aspronisi, and the two Kameni islets in the middle.
The population is around 15,500. Against more than two million visitors a year, which is the santorini facts figure that explains August.
There is no natural fresh water. The island runs almost entirely on desalination.
It rains about 350 to 400 millimetres a year. Almost all of it between November and March.
Those are the santorini facts that explain nearly everything else on the island, from the price of a hotel room to the reason the beaches are black.
History and Names
The island has had at least four names. Strongyle, meaning round, before the eruption. Kalliste, the fairest. Thera, after a Dorian coloniser. And Santorini, from Santa Irini, the name given by Venetian sailors in the Middle Ages after a church on the island.
Its official Greek name is still Thira. Santorini is the international one, and both appear in any list of santorini facts.
It was round before the eruption. Hence Strongyle. The caldera is the hole where the middle used to be, which is the simplest of the santorini facts.
Dorians settled Ancient Thira in the ninth century BC. On a ridge 360 metres above Kamari, and the city was occupied into Byzantine times.
Ptolemaic Egypt used it as a naval base. In the third century BC.
The Venetians ruled it from 1204. Which is where the castle ruins in Oia, Pyrgos, Emporio and Skaros come from, and where the Catholic community in Fira originates.
The Ottomans took it in 1579. And it joined modern Greece in 1832.
A major earthquake struck in 1956. Around 7.5, with widespread destruction, and it emptied villages such as Oia, which had a population of a few hundred by the 1970s.
Tourism transformed it from the 1970s. Within a generation, and it is the most recent of the santorini facts that shaped the island.
Atlantis, and What Is Actually Known
Plato described Atlantis around 360 BC. In the Timaeus and the Critias.
He placed it beyond the Pillars of Hercules. And dated it about nine thousand years before his own time. Neither detail fits this island.
The theory linking the two is modern. Put forward by the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos in 1939.
It is a hypothesis, not a finding. What fits, among the santorini facts, is the shape of the story: a wealthy maritime civilisation, a circular island, and a catastrophe.
The eruption really did end the Minoan settlement here. And Minoan Crete never recovered its dominance afterwards.
Of all the santorini facts repeated by guides, this is the one most often stated as certainty, and it is not.
Akrotiri and the Frescoes
Akrotiri was a Bronze Age town of several thousand people. With paved streets, a drainage system and three-storey houses.
It predates Pompeii by about 1,500 years. And is far less famous, which is the most unjust of the santorini facts.
No bodies have been found. And no jewellery. The inhabitants had warning and left, and where they went is the great unanswered question among the santorini facts.
Excavation began in 1967. Under Marinatos, and only a fraction of the site has been uncovered.
The frescoes are the earliest large-scale landscape paintings in Europe. The fisherman, the boxing boys, the antelopes, the spring fresco and the miniature fleet frieze.
They are split between Athens and Fira. The Museum of Prehistoric Thera holds the local half.
The site is roofed. Which makes it the best wet-weather visit on the island. See Akrotiri.
Santorini Facts About the Wine
There is no soil. The vines grow in aspa, a mix of pumice, ash and pozzolana with almost no organic content.
They live on dew. The ash absorbs night humidity and releases it during the day, which is how anything grows on 350 millimetres of rain a year.
Many vines are ungrafted. Phylloxera never took hold in that substrate, so root systems here are counted in centuries.
They are trained into baskets. The kouloura, a coiled wreath lying on the ground with the fruit sheltered inside it from the wind and the salt. It is done by hand and it exists nowhere else, which makes it the most distinctive of the santorini facts.
The main grape is Assyrtiko. High acid, mineral and saline, and one of the few Mediterranean whites that ages well, which is the santorini facts detail sommeliers care about.
Vinsanto is dried in the sun. For up to two weeks, then aged in barrel for years.
Nykteri is pressed overnight. The name means working through the night.
Around fifteen wineries take visitors. Most of them in the south. See the wine tour.
These are the santorini facts that wine people care about, and they are the reason the island appears on wine lists in cities that have never heard of Akrotiri.
Villages, Houses and the Colours
The whitewash is lime. Cheap, disinfectant and heat-reflecting, and used across the Cyclades for centuries.
It was also mandated by law. During the dictatorship of the late 1960s, which is why it is so uniform and why this is one of the santorini facts guides enjoy telling.
The blue came from a laundry pigment. Mixed into the lime, and the combination happens to be the national colours.
There are only about a dozen famous domes. And one alley in Oia produces an extraordinary share of the photographs, which is among the more deflating santorini facts.
The traditional house is a cave. The yposkafo, dug horizontally into soft pumice, holding about 18 degrees all year and needing no timber on an island with almost no trees.
The inland villages are medieval. Emporio, Pyrgos and Megalochori are built around a kasteli, with houses forming an outer defensive wall against pirates.
There are said to be hundreds of churches. The exact count varies with who is doing the counting, because many are private family chapels.
Fira, Firostefani and Imerovigli are one continuous village. Twenty minutes apart along a level rim path, one of the santorini facts that saves visitors a great deal of driving.
Facts About the Beaches
The sand is ground-down lava. Basalt and scoria, which is why it is black and why it gets too hot to walk on.
Red Beach sits in an oxidised scoria cone. The colour is literally rust.
White Beach is ash and pumice. And has no road to it.
There are no beaches on the caldera side. Because it is the inside wall of a collapsed volcano dropping into 300 metres of water, and that single geological point explains half the santorini facts on this page.
The water is colder than the Aegean average. Because of that depth.
Monolithos is the only shallow one. Everywhere else shelves away within a few metres, which is one of the santorini facts families should know before booking. See Monolithos.
Vlychada’s cliffs are wind-carved ash. Sculpted into fins and hollows, and unlike anything else in Greece.
Food, Farming and Everyday Santorini Facts
The cherry tomato is a local variety. Tiny, intensely concentrated, and grown without irrigation on an island with almost no rain. It has protected designation status.
The white aubergine is unique to the island. Sweeter and less bitter than the purple kind, and it needs no salting.
Fava here is not broad beans. It is a yellow split pea, Lathyrus clymenum, grown on the island and also protected.
Capers grow wild on the walls. Leaves as well as buds are eaten here.
There was a tomato canning industry. The old factory at Vlychada is now a museum.
Pumice was the island’s other export. Quarried in bulk and shipped for construction, including, by tradition, for the Suez Canal.
There are almost no trees. Which is why cave houses were dug rather than roofs framed in timber.
Donkeys were the transport system. Until the roads and the cable car arrived, everything moved up the cliff on an animal.
Those santorini facts explain the menu in every taverna on the island, and they are the reason the food here tastes of somewhere rather than of Greece in general.
Santorini Facts About Tourism
Over two million visitors a year. Against a resident population of around 15,500.
Roughly 800 cruise calls a year. Concentrated between May and October, and the source of most of the santorini facts about crowds.
On a heavy day five ships can be in the caldera. Putting more than ten thousand people ashore through one small quay.
There is no cruise berth. Ships anchor and tender, and passengers reach Fira by cable car, 588 steps or donkey.
The cable car was built in 1979. Funded by a shipowner, and it climbs 220 metres in about three minutes.
The airport handles millions of passengers a season. On a single runway.
There are around thirty taxis. For the entire island, which is among the most useful santorini facts a visitor can have.
Daily cruise arrivals are being capped. The local authority has moved to limit them.
Almost all food arrives by ship. As does most of everything else, which is why prices sit where they do.
Those santorini facts are the ones that decide what a visit actually feels like, far more than any list of sights does.
Things People Get Wrong
Mamma Mia was not filmed here. Skopelos and Skiathos, in the Sporades. It is the most persistent of the false santorini facts.
The blue domes do not face the sunset. They are backlit in the evening and best photographed at seven in the morning, which is the most practically useful of the santorini facts on this page.
Santorini is not a sandy island. The beaches are volcanic grit and pebble.
The sunset is not exclusive to Oia. Every viewpoint on the western rim gets the same sun.
The caldera is not a bay. It is a flooded crater, and getting that right is where most santorini facts start.
The tap water is not undrinkable. It is desalinated and technically potable, and everybody drinks bottled anyway.
The island is not tiny. It is small, but it takes fifty minutes end to end and the buses all route through Fira.
Cave hotels are not a gimmick. They are the traditional dwelling, and any list of santorini facts that calls them a gimmick is wrong.
Santorini Facts for Children
The island exploded and the middle fell into the sea. That is the whole story, and these santorini facts work on anybody over about five.
The black beaches are made of lava. Ground up by the sea for three and a half thousand years, which is the santorini facts version children repeat afterwards.
There is a town buried under the ash. With streets, pots and paintings still in place, and nobody knows where the people went.
The volcano is still growing. A new island in the middle, made of black rock you can walk on.
The houses are dug into the cliff. Like caves, and they stay cool all summer.
The vines are grown in circles on the ground. Like birds’ nests, to hide from the wind.
There are more churches than days in the year. Or so everybody here says, which is where santorini facts and folklore start to blur.
Handing a child three of those santorini facts before the trip is the difference between a hot walk round some old walls and the best morning of the week.
Santorini Facts: Frequently Asked Questions
Is Santorini a volcano? It is the rim of one. The volcano is still active, with Nea Kameni in the middle of the caldera and the last eruption in 1950.
When did Santorini erupt? The Minoan eruption dates to somewhere between about 1620 and 1600 BC. Smaller eruptions have continued, most recently in 1950.
How deep is the caldera? Between 300 and 400 metres, which is why cruise ships anchor rather than moor.
Why is the sand black? It is ground-down basalt and volcanic scoria.
Is Santorini Atlantis? Probably not. The Minoan eruption is the most plausible real event behind Plato’s story, but neither his location nor his date fits.
Why are the houses white and blue? Lime whitewash is cheap, disinfectant and reflects heat, and it was mandated by law in the late 1960s. The blue came from a laundry pigment.
How many people live there? Around 15,500, hosting more than two million visitors a year.
What was Santorini called before? Strongyle, then Kalliste, then Thera. Santorini comes from Santa Irini, a Venetian name.
Is there fresh water? Essentially none. The island runs on desalination.
How old is Akrotiri? It was buried around 1600 BC, roughly 1,500 years before Pompeii.
What is the highest point? Profitis Ilias, at 567 metres.
Why is the wine unusual? Ungrafted vines in volcanic ash, trained into ground-level baskets against the wind, on an island with almost no rain.
Hear the Rest of It on the Island
We are a local operator running private tours and transfers in our own vehicles, and a good part of a guided day is exactly these santorini facts: what the coloured bands in the cliff mean, why the vines look like that, who left Akrotiri and where they went.
Prices are per vehicle rather than per person, hotel pickup anywhere on the island is included, we guide in twelve languages, and an 80 EUR deposit confirms a date.
See the historical tour, the personalised tour, or contact us.
Every Village and Site on the Island
Any of these can be built into a private day. Each has its own page with what to see and how long to allow.
Caldera villages: Fira · Firostefani · Imerovigli · Oia · Finikia · Baxedes
Inland villages: Pyrgos · Megalochori · Emporio · Mesaria · Karterados · Vothonas · Vourvoulos · Exo Gonia · Mesa Gonia · Pigadia
Beaches: Perissa · Perivolos · Kamari · Vlychada · Monolithos · Red Beach · White Beach · Agios Georgios · Agia Paraskevi
Sites and landmarks: Akrotiri · Ancient Thira · Akrotiri Lighthouse · Nea Kameni · Palia Kameni · Thirasia · Athinios Port
All our tours: All Santorini tours · Full day tour · Sightseeing tour · Personalised tour · North part tour · Horse riding · South part tour · Sunset tour · Shore excursion · Caldera tour · Food experience · Wine tour · Historical tour · Small group tour
Planning and services: Famous sights tour · Private transfers · Transfers to Oia and Finikia · Transfers to other villages · Villages of Santorini · History of Santorini · Tours near you · Languages we guide in · Food and fun tours · Gay friendly tours · Our tour buses · Daily tours · Day tours · FAQ · Gallery · Tour photo gallery · About us · Contact · Blog
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