Are restaurants open in Santorini in winter?

Enough of them in Fira and the inland villages, cooking for residents. Oia and the beach fronts largely close from November to March.

Are taxis really that scarce in Santorini?

Yes. Around thirty licensed cars serve the whole island, and none are reliably available at the airport, the port or after dinner in season.

Why do people find the beaches disappointing?

Because they expect white sand. Every beach here is volcanic black, red or grey with steeply shelving water. They are dramatic rather than soft, and the best swimming is from a boat.

Is Akrotiri worth visiting?

It is the best thing on the island after the caldera itself. Take a guide, because the site has almost no signage and without one much of it reads as low walls.

How many days should I stay in Santorini?

Three nights minimum, five ideal, seven comfortable. Two nights is a stopover rather than a visit.

Is Santorini good for families with children?

Yes, with a private vehicle. Monolithos beach, the volcano boat to Nea Kameni and a cooking class all work well with children. The caldera walk and the donkey steps do not.

What is the best month to visit Santorini?

June and September. April, May and October are quieter and cheaper. July and August are hot, crowded and expensive, and the meltemi wind can cancel boat trips.

Are the beaches in Santorini good?

They are black, volcanic and deep, which is a different thing from good. Perissa, Perivolos and Kamari are the organised ones; the best swimming on the island is from a boat.

Is the volcano trip worth doing?

Yes if you want geology. Boats run from the old port to Nea Kameni with a thirty minute climb to the crater, often combined with the hot springs at Palia Kameni.

BEST SANTORINI PRIVATE TOURS

September 3, 2026 By Stelios Karamolegkos

Santorini Restaurants – Where to Eat and What It Costs

Top 10 Restaurants in Santorini

The best Santorini restaurants are inland, not on the caldera rim: Pyrgos, Exo Gonia, Megalochori and Emporio charge about a third of rim prices and cook better. Santorini Tours drives guests to them every week. Fish at Ammoudi or Vlychada, one rim dinner, and everything else in a village.

The weather may not have decided yet if it wants to show us its good face or not, but we are convinced that the islands are waiting for us.

Greece has beauties for the whole year. Santorini, who is the heart of its visitors, will fill the picturesque alleys and become one with the locals.

Whether you are organizing an Easter trip or thinking about your summer vacation now, this article is of interest to you. Before you book tickets and prepare luggage, check out the best 10 restaurants on the island to choose the best culinary delights of Santorini.

You can always book a Santorini Private Tour to visit Santorini’s sightseeings and wineries along with the restaurants you will choose to have dinner.

Santorini is all time classic on the list of the ten things that you have to do before you die. We, here in Greece are a little bit more fortunate than the rest, as we have it relatively closer to us. When you manage to leave Oia and the spectacular sunset, you descend the volcano and decide to eat, then the fava and the tomato balls are must.

Check the following lists for all day food

Most of us take our breakfast in our hotels so my list does not involve places for breakfast. There is a large number of villages in Santorini which you can visit, see the sightseeings and eat.

Top 10 Restaurants in Santorini for lunch

Seaside Santorini
Pitogyros (ΠιτόΓύρος)
Falafeland
Terra Nerra
No Name Grill House
Aroma Aulis Food & Wine (Άρωμα Αυλής)
Anemoloos (Ανεμόλοος)
Seaside Santorini
Theoni’s Kitchen
Imba

Top 10 Restaurants in Santorini for dinner

Terpsi in Oia
Le Ciel Restaurant
Ombra Restaurant
Casa di Te Santorini
FlyAway Creative Restaurant & Bar powered by WEST EAST SUITES
Jaipur Palace Santorini
Leukes (Λεύκες)
Aroma Aulis Food & Wine (Άρωμα Αυλής)
Melitini (Μελιτίνι)
Throubi Restaurant

Of course there are many more excellent restaurants and as we all know, food is a matter of taste, so we cannot write them all down, but you can also ask the locals and arrange Private Transfers to wherever you desire to have your dinner or lunch.

You can also check our previous article to learn about traditional dishes of the island and find out the best food in Santorini and which dish to try!

You can take a tour of Santorini!

Take a Santorini private tour

Santorini private tours offer tasting tours of production sites and vineyards; visits to museums and traditional Oia Greece canaves are some of the options that will give you an intoxicating experience.

Santorini Full Day Private Tour
Santorini Sightseeing Private Tour
Santorini Private Custom Tour
Popular Destination Santorini Private Tour
Santorini Private Tour and Food Experience
Santorini Exclusive Shore Private Tour
Santorini Impressive Caldera Private Tour
Santorini South Part Private Tour
Santorini North Part Private Tour
Santorini Historical Private Tour
Santorini Sunset Private Tour

Santorini Restaurants: The Short Answer

Eat inland. That is the whole Santorini restaurants guide in two words, and it is the single piece of advice that changes most people’s week here.

Santorini restaurants divide almost perfectly along one line: those with a caldera view and those without. The view costs roughly two to three times as much for food that is, on average, worse. The village tavernas at Pyrgos, Megalochori, Exo Gonia, Emporio and Vothonas are fifteen minutes from Fira, cook for people who live here, and charge ordinary Greek prices.

Do the rim once, for the occasion. Do everything else inland, at the fish tavernas in Ammoudi and Vlychada, or on the beach fronts at Perissa and Kamari. That single decision will save a family several hundred euro across a week and improve what they eat.

Below: what to eat, where to eat it by area, what it costs, when to book, and the mistakes that make people say the food here is overpriced.

What Do Santorini Restaurants Do Best?

The volcanic soil and the near-total absence of rain produce ingredients that grow nowhere else in Greece, and the good Santorini restaurants are built on them.

Fava

Yellow split pea puree, served warm with olive oil, capers and raw onion. Santorini fava has PDO protection, which means it can only be called that if it is grown here. It is on every menu on the island and it is the single dish to order first, because how a kitchen makes fava tells you what kind of place you are in.

Tomatokeftedes

Fritters made from the tiny Santorini cherry tomato. The variety grows with no irrigation at all, which concentrates the sugars and gives it a flavour nothing in a supermarket approaches. Served with a yoghurt dip.

White aubergine

Sweeter, less bitter and less watery than the purple kind, grown here and almost nowhere else. Usually grilled, sometimes as a spread.

Chloro cheese

Fresh, soft, slightly sour goat cheese made on the island in small quantities and rarely exported off it. Often served with tomatokeftedes or in a salad instead of feta.

Capers and caper leaves

Wild, salted and in half the salads here. The leaves are the local touch that visitors do not expect.

Katsouni

A local cucumber that is left to ripen and eaten more like a melon. Rarer, and a sign of a kitchen that shops locally.

Fresh fish

Priced by the kilo and chosen at the counter. Ammoudi below Oia and the marina at Vlychada are the two places to do this properly.

Slow-cooked meat

Goat, lamb and rooster in tomato, done properly in the inland villages and rarely on the rim.

Assyrtiko and Vinsanto

The dry saline white and the sweet amber dessert wine, both from the same grape. Any decent restaurant here will pour Assyrtiko by the glass. Wine tour.

What to be sceptical about

Anything described as a “Santorini special” on a laminated menu with photographs. The best Santorini restaurants have short menus that change, not long ones that do not.

Where Are the Best Santorini Restaurants by Area?

The island is small enough that you can eat anywhere on it, and different enough between areas that where you eat matters more than what you order.

Pyrgos

The best all-round area for Santorini restaurants. The highest village on the island, fifteen minutes from Fira, with a Venetian castle at the top and tavernas up the lanes. Genuinely the best combination on the island of food, price and view – you look down over the whole of Santorini rather than out at the caldera, and you pay village prices. Several long-established tables here are the ones locals recommend to each other. Pyrgos.

Exo Gonia

Five minutes from Pyrgos, a small village most visitors drive past, and home to some of the most consistently praised Santorini restaurants on the island. Traditional Cycladic cooking done seriously, with a terrace looking east. Book in season; it is not a secret any more. Exo Gonia.

Megalochori

Bell towers, cave houses, walled mansions and two wineries within walking distance. A handful of tables in the square and along the lanes, all of them reasonable, none of them touristy. The best place on the island for a long lunch. Megalochori.

Emporio

The cheapest sit-down Santorini restaurants on the island. Tavernas inside and around the medieval kastelli, cooking for residents. Cheapest proper meals on the island. Emporio.

Ammoudi

The most photographed of all Santorini restaurants settings. The old harbour of Oia, at the bottom of about 300 steps or a switchback road. Six or seven fish tavernas with tables on the water, fish chosen from the counter and priced by the kilo. This is the one non-inland exception worth paying for. Go for a late lunch rather than at sunset, when every table is booked and the steps are full. Oia.

Vlychada

The most under-rated of the fish Santorini restaurants. A quiet marina on the south coast under wind-carved grey cliffs, with a couple of fish restaurants that locals rate above Ammoudi and tourists have not entirely found. Flat, easy to park at, and calm in the evening. Vlychada.

Fira

Fira has the widest choice of Santorini restaurants and the widest range in quality. Everything from a few euro of gyros to a full caldera-view tasting menu, within four hundred metres. The rule here is simple: the further back from the rim you walk, the better the value. Fira also has the island’s only real late-night eating. Fira.

Firostefani and Imerovigli

Caldera-view Santorini restaurants without the Oia premium, and a slightly calmer clientele. If you want the view dinner, this is where we would have it rather than in Oia. Imerovigli.

Oia

The most expensive of the Santorini restaurants by a distance, and the most booked. Some of it is genuinely excellent and all of it is priced for the sunset. Book weeks ahead in July and August for anything with a view.

Kamari

A long promenade of tavernas and beach fronts under the cliff of Ancient Thira, plus an open-air cinema. Family-friendly, mid-priced, and the quality is more consistent than Perissa. Kamari.

Perissa and Perivolos

The cheapest beach-front Santorini restaurants. Seven kilometres of beach front with everything from souvlaki to seafood, at the lowest prices of any organised area. Perivolos is the quieter, slightly better half. Perissa · Perivolos.

Karterados, Messaria and Vothonas

The most honest Santorini restaurants on the island. Working villages within ten minutes of Fira with no view, no marketing and the most honest prices on the island. If you are staying nearby, eat here. Karterados · Vothonas.

The wineries

Several estates run their own Santorini restaurants or serve plates alongside a tasting, with views over the caldera or across the vines. Lunch at a winery is one of the better meals available here and one of the least booked.

What Should You Order in Each Course?

A practical ordering guide, because Santorini restaurants use Greek menu structure are organised differently from most European ones and the mistake is usually structural rather than culinary.

The salad

Order one for the table, not one each. A horiatiki here comes with capers and often chloro instead of feta, and it is a substantial dish rather than a side.

The dips

Fava first, always. Then tzatziki, melitzanosalata or a caper spread. Bread arrives with them and is usually charged as a small cover.

The hot mezedes

Tomatokeftedes, grilled white aubergine, saganaki, gigantes, dolmades, fried courgette. Three or four of these between two people is a meal on its own and it is how the island actually eats.

The greens

Horta – boiled wild greens with lemon and oil – is on every menu and almost never ordered by visitors. It is the healthiest thing in the room and it costs very little.

The main

One between two if you have ordered mezedes properly. Fish by the kilo, slow-cooked goat or lamb, or grilled meat. The best Santorini restaurants inland do the slow-cooked dishes best.

The wine

House white by the half litre with mezedes; a bottle of Assyrtiko if you are eating fish and want to taste the island properly.

Dessert

Usually brought free at the end – a plate of fruit, a small cake, a shot of something. Ordering dessert as well is optional and often unnecessary.

Coffee

Afterwards, and elsewhere. Greeks eat and then go somewhere else for coffee.

How Does the Season Change Where You Eat?

April and May

Everything reopening, Lenten dishes at their best around Easter, and no need to book anywhere. The kitchens are fresh and the staff are not yet exhausted, which is a genuine factor in how well you eat.

June

Full season, every one of the Santorini restaurants open, and booking becomes worthwhile for the rim. The best month overall for eating here.

July and August

Every table with a view is booked, service is under pressure everywhere, and prices are at their peak. The inland villages absorb this far better than the rim does, which is another reason to eat there.

September

The harvest is in, the wineries are busy, the Santorini restaurants relax, the crowds thin after the first week, and the kitchens relax. Many people’s favourite month for food.

October

Good value, quieter, and businesses begin closing from the middle of the month.

November to March

Fira and the inland villages keep enough Santorini restaurants open all year. Oia and the beach fronts largely close. Winter menus are cooked for residents, which means slower dishes, lower prices and better food.

Where Do the Ingredients Come From?

Worth asking, because a good number of Santorini restaurants import almost everything.

Tomatoes and fava from the island’s own fields, in season, from small growers. Out of season some of it is imported and a good kitchen will say so.

Chloro from a handful of small producers. If a menu lists it, that is a positive signal.

Capers gathered wild, salted, and genuinely local.

Fish from small boats, landed at Vlychada and the other small harbours. Not everything on a fish menu is local and the honest places will tell you which is which.

Meat mostly from other islands and the mainland; there is very little grazing here.

Wine from the island’s own estates, and the good Santorini restaurants pour it by the glass rather than only by the bottle.

Everything else arrives by ferry, which is part of why prices are higher here than on the mainland even away from the caldera.

What Do Santorini Restaurants Cost?

Bands rather than prices, because they move with the season and the exchange rate. All per person, food only.

Street food

Gyros or souvlaki wrapped in pitta, single figures, and available in Fira, Kamari, Perissa and most villages. Genuinely good, and the reason nobody needs to go hungry expensively on this island.

Bakery

Breakfast for a few euro: bougatsa, tiropita, koulouri, fresh bread. Every village has one and they open early. Skipping the hotel buffet in favour of a bakery is the easiest saving available here.

Village taverna

A full meal with a salad, two or three shared plates, a main and a half litre of wine at an ordinary Greek price. This is where the good Santorini restaurants live.

Beach front

Slightly above village prices, with a wider menu and more variation in quality.

Fish taverna at Ammoudi or Vlychada

Fish is priced by the kilo and you choose it at the counter. Ask the price per kilo and the weight of the piece before you agree – this is normal and nobody is offended. A shared whole fish with sides is a proper occasion meal.

Caldera-view restaurant

Two to three times a village taverna for comparable food. These are the Santorini restaurants people mean when they call the island expensive. Firostefani and Imerovigli are cheaper than Oia for the same view.

Fine dining

The island has several genuinely serious Santorini restaurants, mostly on the rim and at one or two of the wineries, with tasting menus at European city prices.

Wine

House wine by the half litre is cheap. Bottled Assyrtiko in a restaurant is roughly double the estate door price, which is normal everywhere. Vinsanto by the glass is worth it once.

What a week costs

A couple eating one bakery breakfast, one cheap lunch and one taverna dinner a day will spend a fraction of what a couple eating two rim meals a day spends. Across seven days the difference is comfortably the price of a private full-day tour.

When Should You Eat, and Do You Need to Book?

Greek meal times

Santorini restaurants run on Greek hours. Lunch runs from about half past one to four. Dinner starts at nine and a kitchen is busiest between half past nine and eleven. A restaurant that is full at seven is cooking for tourists; a restaurant that is empty at seven and full at ten is cooking for Greeks.

Booking

Essential for anything with a caldera view in July and August – several days ahead, and weeks ahead in Oia for sunset. Unnecessary for village tavernas outside the peak, though a phone call the same morning is polite and gets you the better table.

Sunset dinners

Every table with a view of the sun going down is booked in high season. If you have not booked, eat at half past nine after the sunset crowd has turned over, which is also when the food gets better because the kitchen has settled.

Cruise passengers

You will be eating lunch, not dinner. Do it inland: Megalochori, Pyrgos or Exo Gonia, all fifteen minutes from Fira and a third of the rim price. Shore excursion.

Sunday and holidays

Village Santorini restaurants fill with families at lunch on Sundays. It is the best time to be in one and the hardest time to get a table without calling.

Out of season

Many Santorini restaurants close from November to March. Fira and the inland villages keep enough open all year; Oia and the beach fronts largely do not. Santorini in winter.

How Do You Tell a Good Taverna From a Bad One?

Ten signals for sorting Santorini restaurants, all of which work anywhere in Greece and all of which work particularly well here, where the ratio of tourist-facing to resident-facing Santorini restaurants is unusually high.

A short menu. Twelve dishes cooked today beats sixty dishes cooked at some point.

No photographs of the food. A laminated picture menu is aimed at people who will eat there once.

Nobody outside inviting you in. Restaurants that need a tout on the pavement need one for a reason.

Greek voices at the tables. Especially at half past nine.

Handwritten daily specials. Usually on a board, often only in Greek. Ask what they are.

Fish priced by the kilo, displayed on ice. Not “fresh fish” as a menu line with a fixed price.

Fava that tastes of something. The house benchmark dish.

House wine in a jug. A place confident enough to pour its own.

Off the main street. One lane back from the rim in Fira, or up the hill in Pyrgos.

Slightly awkward service. Family-run places are run by families, not by a hospitality script.

Conversely, the warning signs that separate weak Santorini restaurants from good ones: a view that dominates the marketing, a menu in six languages with photographs, a set “Greek night” with dancing, and prices that are hidden until you sit down.

What Mistakes Do People Make With Santorini Restaurants?

Eating every meal on the caldera rim. The single most expensive habit on this island, and the food is not better.

Never leaving Fira and Oia. Two villages out of thirty-two, and neither of them is where the island eats.

Turning up at seven and finding it empty. That is not a bad restaurant; that is a Greek restaurant before dinner time.

Not asking the price of fish per kilo. Entirely normal to ask, and the source of most complaints about being overcharged.

Assuming a service charge is a tip. Tipping is not obligatory here. Rounding up is normal and ten percent is generous.

Ordering a main each. Greek eating is shared plates. Two or three mezedes and one main between two is more food than most people expect.

Skipping the village tavernas because they look plain. The plainest rooms have the best kitchens, which is the most reliable rule about Santorini restaurants there is.

Booking sunset dinner at eight. You will be eating in a crush with a kitchen at full stretch. Nine thirty is better food and a calmer room.

Buying wine in a gift shop. The estates are fifteen minutes away and cheaper at the door.

Drinking the tap water. The island runs largely on desalination. Order bottled.

What If You Have Dietary Requirements?

Vegetarian

Santorini restaurants serve vegetarians extremely well, almost by accident. Greek Lenten cooking – nistisima – is essentially vegan, and every taverna has fava, gigantes, dolmades, briam, horta, tomatokeftedes and grilled vegetables as standard.

Vegan

Vegan eating in Santorini restaurants is easier than in most of Europe if you are willing to eat mezedes rather than mains. Check that fava has not been finished with anything, and that horta is dressed with oil rather than butter.

Gluten free

Grilled fish and meat, salads, fava and vegetables are naturally fine. Bread and pitta are not, and cross-contamination in a small kitchen is a real consideration.

Dairy free

Straightforward, but check for yoghurt in dips and feta appearing uninvited in salads.

Allergies

Say it clearly at the start. Greek kitchens are generally helpful and generally informal, so specific and early is better than polite and vague.

Children

Children are very welcome in Santorini restaurants and often actively fussed over. Most Santorini restaurants will do a plain grilled chicken or a plate of chips without being asked twice, and nobody minds a child moving around a taverna.

Are the Caldera-View Restaurants Worth It?

Once, yes. As a habit, no. It is worth setting out both sides properly rather than simply telling people to avoid them.

The case for

The caldera at sunset from a table on the rim is one of the great settings in European dining, and no photograph prepares you for it. Several of the kitchens are genuinely serious, with proper wine lists and cooking that would hold up in any European city. If you are here for a honeymoon, an anniversary or once in your life, you should do it, and you should book it properly rather than take whatever is left.

The case against

Two to three times the price for food that is often no better than a village taverna’s. Tables packed close because rim frontage is the most expensive real estate on the island. Service under pressure from six to nine because everybody wants the same ninety minutes. And a room where nobody is looking at the food.

Where to do it

Firostefani or Imerovigli rather than Oia. The same caldera, the same sunset, a calmer room and a noticeably smaller bill. Oia charges a premium for being Oia.

How to do it well

Book at half past nine rather than eight. The sunset crowd has turned over, the kitchen has settled, the room is quieter and the food is better. You still get the afterglow, which is arguably the better light anyway.

How to get the view for nothing

Have one drink on the rim at sunset and dinner in a village afterwards. The view from the public path is identical, and this is what a good number of residents do.

The honest summary

Caldera-view Santorini restaurants sell a setting and price it accordingly, which is entirely fair. The mistake is buying it seven nights running without noticing.

What Do People Complain About Most?

Reading complaints about Santorini restaurants, the same six come up, and five of them are avoidable.

“Overpriced.” Almost always about the caldera rim. Inland prices are ordinary.

“Charged too much for fish.” Fish is by the kilo. Ask the price per kilo and the weight of the piece before agreeing. Nobody is offended and the problem disappears.

“The restaurant was empty.” At seven o’clock, in Greece. It was full at ten.

“Rushed service.” Usually a rim restaurant during the sunset turnover. Book later.

“Touristy food.” Usually a picture menu on a main street. One lane back is a different island.

“Bread we didn’t order.” A small cover charge, standard across Greece, and it is on the menu.

The one genuine complaint that is not the visitor’s fault: in peak August, a good number of kitchens are running at a volume they were not built for, and quality slips everywhere. That is a reason to come in June or September rather than a reason to eat somewhere else.

What Makes the Food Here Different?

Worth understanding, because it explains why the good Santorini restaurants taste unlike anywhere else in Greece and why the bad ones taste like everywhere else.

No rain, no irrigation

Santorini gets very little rainfall and the island runs on desalination. Traditional agriculture here has almost no irrigation at all. Plants survive on night moisture drawn out of the sea air by the porous volcanic soil, and the result is small fruit with concentrated flavour. The cherry tomato is the clearest example: tiny, intensely sweet, and nothing like a commercial tomato.

Volcanic soil

The ash and pumice laid down by the eruption of around 1600 BC drain instantly and hold minerals. It is why the wine is saline, why the fava is dense, and why the aubergines are sweet.

Wind

The meltemi shapes the agriculture as much as the soil does. Vines are woven into low baskets to shelter the fruit; crops are grown low and close. Everything here grows defensively.

Scarcity

Historically this was a poor island with limited water, so the cooking is built on pulses, preserved things, capers, wild greens and small quantities of meat. That is still the backbone of the menu at a village taverna, and it is why Lenten cooking here is so good.

The sea

The caldera drops four hundred metres and the fishing is small-boat rather than industrial. Fish is priced by the kilo because it arrives by the kilo.

What that means for you

Order the things that come out of this specific ground: fava, tomatokeftedes, white aubergine, chloro, capers, Assyrtiko. Santorini restaurants that put those at the centre of the menu are the ones worth eating in; those that bury them under an international list are trading on the view.

How Do You Eat Well on a Budget?

Santorini restaurants have a reputation for being expensive and it is entirely possible to eat here for ordinary Greek money.

Bakery breakfast. Cheaper than any of the Santorini restaurants and better than most hotel buffets. every day. Across a week that alone pays for a tour.

Gyros lunch. Single figures, genuinely good, and available in Fira, Karterados, Kamari and Perissa.

Village dinner. The cheapest good Santorini restaurants: Pyrgos, Megalochori, Emporio, Exo Gonia, Vothonas. A third of rim prices.

Share. Greek eating is mezedes in the middle of the table. Two people ordering a main each is both more expensive and less interesting.

House wine. By the half litre, from the jug, and usually perfectly good.

Supermarket lunch on a beach day. Bread, tomatoes, chloro, olives, fruit. Nobody minds.

Eat the big meal at lunch. Many Santorini restaurants run cheaper lunch menus, and the kitchen is calmer.

Skip the caldera view except once. The view is free from the street. Pay for it deliberately, one evening, rather than by accident every evening.

Buy wine at the estate. Not in a Fira gift shop.

Go in the shoulder season. April, May, September and October are cheaper across the board and the same kitchens are open.

What Do the Locals Eat?

Different from the visitor menu in a few consistent ways, and worth copying.

Later. Nine or half past nine for dinner, one thirty to three for lunch.

Shared. A table of mezedes rather than a plate each.

Inland. Almost nobody who lives here uses the caldera Santorini restaurants except for an occasion. eats on the caldera rim except for an occasion.

Fish at the harbours. Vlychada and the small ports rather than the famous ones.

Sunday lunch as the main event. Families, long tables, and village tavernas full from two o’clock.

Wine by the jug. Bottled Assyrtiko is what you take home, not what you drink with a Tuesday dinner.

Nistisima in Lent. The Lenten dishes are on every menu in spring and they are some of the best cooking of the year.

Coffee for two hours. A freddo is a place to sit, not a drink to finish.

Copying those habits will get you better meals in Santorini restaurants than any list of names, because it puts you in the right places at the right hours ordering the right things.

Which Santorini Restaurants Suit Which Occasion?

The one big dinner

Firostefani or Imerovigli, on the rim, booked, at nine. Same caldera as Oia, calmer room, noticeably lower bill. If it has to be Oia, book weeks ahead and accept the premium.

The best meal of the week

Exo Gonia or Pyrgos, at lunch, with a bottle of Assyrtiko and no plan for the afternoon. This is where the Santorini restaurants that locals actually recommend are.

Fish

Ammoudi for the setting, Vlychada for the fish. Late lunch at both.

With children

Kamari or Perissa beach front, early, where nobody minds noise and there is sand to run on afterwards. Monolithos if they are very small. Monolithos.

Cheap and excellent

Gyros in Fira or Karterados, eaten standing up. Nothing on the rim comes close on value.

A long lunch with wine

A winery. Someone else drives, the food is designed around the wine, and the view is over the vines rather than the crowd. Wine tour.

Honeymoon

One rim dinner, one Ammoudi lunch, and the rest inland. Couples who do the reverse spend three times as much and eat worse.

A group or a celebration

An inland taverna with a long table, ordering mezedes for the middle. Call ahead, tell them the number, and let them feed you.

Late at night

Fira, and effectively only Fira. It has the only late-night Santorini restaurants on the island. Everywhere else on the island stops serving by about eleven.

Breakfast

A village bakery. Bougatsa and a coffee for a fraction of a hotel buffet.

What About Coffee, Bars and Sweets?

Coffee

Freddo espresso and freddo cappuccino are the national drinks in summer and every kafeneio makes them properly. A frappe is the older version and still everywhere. Greek coffee, briki-made, is for sitting down with.

Bakeries and sweets

Bougatsa, galaktoboureko, loukoumades, and in December melomakarona and kourabiedes. Every village bakery does at least three of these well.

Bars

Fira has the rim bars and the island’s only real late nightlife. Perissa and Perivolos have beach bars that run late in season. Oia closes early on purpose. Imerovigli and the villages are quiet by midnight.

Wine bars

Fira and Oia both have serious ones, pouring flights of Assyrtiko, Nykteri, Mavrotragano and Vinsanto. A good alternative to a full tasting if you have no driver.

Beach clubs

Perivolos and Vlychada, running from late morning to the evening in season. Food is incidental; the loungers are the product.

What to drink

Assyrtiko with everything from the sea. Vinsanto after dinner, once. Ouzo or tsipouro with mezedes if you like anise. Local beer is decent and cheap, and the tap water is desalinated so drink bottled.

Santorini Restaurants by Budget

Under ten euro a head

Gyros, souvlaki, bakery food and a supermarket beach lunch. The cheapest Santorini restaurants are the ones without tables, and they are genuinely good.

Fifteen to twenty-five a head

A village taverna: salad, two mezedes, a shared main and house wine. This band contains most of the Santorini restaurants worth going out of your way for.

Twenty-five to forty a head

Beach fronts, the better inland kitchens, a winery lunch, and fish at Vlychada. The best value-for-quality band on the island.

Forty to seventy a head

Caldera-view Santorini restaurants at Firostefani and Imerovigli, and fish at Ammoudi with a bottle of Assyrtiko.

Seventy and upwards

Oia at sunset, tasting menus, and the island’s serious fine dining. Worth it once and unnecessary twice.

How the bands actually behave

The jump from the second band to the fourth buys you a view rather than better cooking. The jump from the first to the second buys you a proper meal. That is the whole economics of Santorini restaurants in two sentences, and it is why the advice on this page keeps coming back to the same thing: pay for the view deliberately, once, and eat inland the rest of the week.

Where Should You Eat on Each Kind of Day?

Most people plan their sightseeing and let lunch happen to them. Reversing that produces a better week, because the good Santorini restaurants are not where the sights are.

An Akrotiri and south coast day

The site in the morning, the lighthouse or Red Beach late morning, then inland to Megalochori or Emporio for lunch. Both are ten minutes from Akrotiri and neither has a queue. Akrotiri.

An Ancient Thira and east coast day

The site early, before it closes in the early afternoon, then down to Kamari for lunch on the front, or up to Exo Gonia if you want the better meal. Ancient Thira.

A wine day

Three estates with a driver, and lunch at one of them. This is the one day where the eating and the sightseeing are the same thing.

A beach day

Perissa, Perivolos or Vlychada, and eat on the front where you are. Vlychada is the better food; Perivolos is the better beach.

A caldera villages day

Fira and the rim walk in the morning, inland for lunch, back to Oia after six. Eating in Oia or Fira at one o’clock in August is the most reliable way to have a bad meal expensively.

A boat day

Lunch is usually cooked on board. Eat light in the evening, in a village, at nine.

A cruise day

Fifteen minutes inland from the cable car: Megalochori, Pyrgos or Exo Gonia. You get a real meal and you avoid the two busiest villages on the island at their busiest hour. Cruise guide.

An arrival or departure day

Do not book any of the Santorini restaurants. Bakery, gyros or whatever is nearest. Every attempt to have a memorable meal on a travel day is a wasted booking.

How Do You Find a Good Place Without a List?

Lists of Santorini restaurants go out of date fast – kitchens change hands, chefs move, a place that was superb in 2022 is ordinary now. These habits work permanently.

Walk one lane back. Anywhere on the rim, in any village, in any beach front. Frontage costs money and somebody has to pay it.

Ask a driver, not a hotel desk. Drivers eat out constantly and have no commission arrangement. Hotel desks often do.

Look at half past nine. Santorini restaurants fill on Greek time. Walk past at nine forty-five and see who is inside.

Check the fava. It is the cheapest thing on the menu and it tells you everything about the kitchen.

Follow the wineries. Estates recommend the places their own people eat.

Read recent reviews only. Anything older than a season is unreliable here.

Trust the village over the name. A mediocre taverna in Emporio will still feed you better and cheaper than a well-reviewed one on the rim.

Applying those five minutes of judgement will beat any published list of Santorini restaurants, including this page, because it works on the island as it is this week rather than as somebody found it two summers ago.

What Changed in the Last Few Years?

Worth knowing if you last came before the pandemic, because Santorini restaurants have shifted in three visible ways.

Upwards. There are considerably more serious Santorini restaurants than there were a decade ago, with proper wine programmes and cooking that takes the island’s own ingredients seriously rather than treating them as garnish. That is a real improvement.

More expensive on the rim. Caldera frontage has gone up faster than anything else, and the gap between rim and village prices is wider than it has ever been.

Busier earlier. Booking windows that used to be a day are now a week for anything with a view in August.

More inland options. Pyrgos, Megalochori and Exo Gonia have all gained places aimed at visitors who have worked out that inland is better value, which is good for choice and has pushed prices up a little there too.

What has not changed. The village taverna cooking for its neighbours, at nine at night, with a short menu and a jug of wine. That is still the best meal on the island and it still costs a third of the rim.

The One-Paragraph Version

Eat inland, at nine, sharing mezedes, with house wine, and order fava first. Do one caldera dinner in Firostefani or Imerovigli rather than Oia, booked for half past nine. Have one late lunch at Ammoudi or Vlychada with fish chosen at the counter and priced by the kilo. Buy your wine at the estate. Skip the hotel breakfast for a bakery. Do that and the island’s reputation for expensive, indifferent food will make no sense to you at all, because you will have spent the week eating in the Santorini restaurants that the fifteen thousand people who live here actually use.

A Week of Eating, Planned

One worked plan for a week of Santorini restaurants, so the advice above is concrete rather than abstract.

Day 1, arrival. Late and tired. Eat wherever you are staying, or gyros in Fira. Do not waste a booking on the day you land.

Day 2. Bakery breakfast. Lunch in Megalochori after the morning’s sightseeing. Dinner at a village taverna in Pyrgos, at nine.

Day 3. Beach day at Perissa or Kamari, lunch on the front. Dinner in Fira, one lane back from the rim.

Day 4. Winery lunch, long, with a driver. Something light in the evening.

Day 5. Late lunch at Ammoudi with fish chosen at the counter, then the walk back up. Nothing in the evening.

Day 6. The one big dinner: Firostefani or Imerovigli, booked, at nine, with the caldera in front of you.

Day 7. Emporio or Exo Gonia for a last long lunch, and a bakery for the flight.

That is one rim dinner, one fish lunch, one winery and four village meals. It is roughly half the cost of seven rim dinners and it is a considerably better week of food. Almost every complaint about Santorini restaurants comes from doing the opposite.

Santorini Restaurants: Frequently Asked Questions

Where are the best restaurants in Santorini? The inland villages – Pyrgos, Exo Gonia, Megalochori and Emporio – for food and value, Ammoudi and Vlychada for fish, and Firostefani or Imerovigli for a caldera view without the Oia premium.

Is eating in Santorini expensive? On the caldera rim, yes, two to three times inland prices. Everywhere else it is priced like the rest of Greece. Eating inland roughly halves a week’s food bill.

What should I eat in Santorini? Fava, tomatokeftedes, white aubergine, chloro cheese, capers and fresh fish, with Assyrtiko to drink and Vinsanto afterwards.

Do I need to book? For a caldera view in July and August, several days ahead, and weeks ahead in Oia for sunset. For village tavernas, a call the same morning is enough.

What time do people eat dinner? Nine, and the busiest hour is half past nine to eleven. A restaurant full at seven is cooking for tourists.

Are Santorini restaurants good for vegetarians? Very. Greek Lenten cooking is essentially vegan and every taverna carries fava, gigantes, dolmades, briam, horta and grilled vegetables as standard.

Where should cruise passengers eat? Inland, fifteen minutes from Fira, at Megalochori, Pyrgos or Exo Gonia. A third of the rim price and no queue.

Is the fish fresh? At the harbour tavernas at Ammoudi and Vlychada, yes, and it is priced by the kilo. Ask the price per kilo and the weight before you agree – this is normal.

How much should I tip? Tipping is not obligatory in Greece. Rounding up is normal and ten percent is generous.

Can I drink the tap water? The island runs largely on desalination. Drink bottled.

Are restaurants open in winter? Enough of them in Fira and the inland villages. Oia and the beach fronts largely close from November to March.

What is the single best food decision here? Eating away from the caldera. Everything else on this page is detail.

Eat Where the Island Eats

We are a local operator and we drive guests to these Santorini restaurants every week. If you want a food day rather than a sightseeing day, we will build one: two wineries, a long lunch inland, and nobody driving afterwards.

Tell us your dates, where you are staying and what you have already booked. Prices are per vehicle rather than per person, so a family of four pays what a couple pays, hotel pickup anywhere on the island is included, and an 80 EUR deposit confirms a date.

See the food and wine experience, the food and fun tours, the full list of tours, or the FAQ.

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

September 3, 2026 By Stelios Karamolegkos

Santorini Mistakes – 50 Things Visitors Get Wrong

The 4 most common mistakes Santorini travellers do

The biggest Santorini mistakes are connecting a ferry to a same-day flight, booking a caldera hotel without asking how many steps, planning six stops on an island whose roads allow three, and being in Fira or Oia between eleven and five. Fifty more are below.

It’s summer and you’ve already planned (Santorini Tours) your vacation. Santorini or any Greek island, you will find somewhere to get away from your everyday life and fill your batteries for the upcoming winter. And you may think everything is ready and planned, but you have to know that there are some things that, if you do not consider it, your vacation may be a nightmare.

What should you do before you start your vacation?

In order to protect yourself, we should list the 4 most common mistakes Santorini travellers do!

1. You should always keep copies of your travel documents

You might want to have a photocopy of your ID, your ticket and your passport somewhere in your suitcase. You never know what can happen. So if you lose or fall victim to theft at least you will make your life easier with the specific copies.

2. You’re loading your schedule

It is understandable that when you travel (especially in Santorini) you want to visit all the sites (SANTORINI SIGHTSEEING PRIVATE TOUR) they have suggested to you and have discovered with a few searches on each of the online platforms. However, travel and holidays are consistent with rest, so loading your schedule without ensuring the required time of relaxation is not the most prudent.

3. You should book private tours for all activities

Get ready for your trip and make sure to book a Santorini private tour for theatres, restaurants and museums in advance. This is one of the biggest mistakes a traveller can do because without good organization you lose a lot of the magic of your vacation and the freedom of movement in the new place you visit. Enjoy the local culture and eliminated any compulsions.

4. You do not have the right budget

Correctly calculate both your revenue and the expense you will have for the trip you are planning. Take care of the room that you choose to stay so you can afford to go further to the places you visit and SANTORINI SUNSET PRIVATE TOUR. Make a plan and calculate how much money you can spend each day of your stay.

Do not forget:

With the right preparation you can enjoy your vacation without affecting your budget! You can take a tour of Santorini!

See more about Santorini island:

Santorini Mistakes: The Short List

The ten Santorini mistakes that cost visitors the most, in order of how often we watch them happen.

1. Connecting a ferry to a same-day flight. The wind cancels sailings at short notice and the flight goes without you.

2. Booking a caldera hotel without asking how many steps.

3. Planning six things in a day on an island whose roads allow three.

4. Being in Fira or Oia between eleven and five in summer.

5. Expecting a taxi. There are about thirty licensed cars for the whole island.

6. Watching the sunset from the Oia castle with three thousand other people.

7. Eating every dinner on the caldera rim at triple the inland price.

8. Skipping Akrotiri because a Bronze Age site sounds dull.

9. Hiring a quad on unlit roads with gravel on the bends.

10. Leaving the cable car until the end of a cruise call.

Everything below expands on those and adds about forty more. None of these Santorini mistakes are exotic. They are the ordinary ones, made by sensible people, because the island does not behave the way it looks on a map.

What Are the Planning Santorini Mistakes?

Connecting a ferry to a flight on the same day

The single most expensive of all Santorini mistakes. The meltemi wind cancels high-speed craft first and sometimes closes the port entirely, usually with a couple of hours’ notice. If your flight home is at six and your ferry from Naxos is at two, you are gambling a plane ticket on the weather. Leave a full day, or fly.

Going in August because that is when the holidays are

Thirty-five degrees, five cruise ships a day, the strongest wind of the year and peak prices. May, June, September and early October give you the same island at half the cost and a third of the crowd. If August is genuinely your only window, plan an early-start, inland-midday trip and book everything months ahead.

Booking two nights and expecting to see the island

Two nights is a stopover. Three is the workable minimum, five is comfortable. A great many Santorini mistakes are really one mistake – not enough time – wearing different clothes.

Booking ten nights and expecting to fill them

The opposite of most Santorini mistakes. The island is eighteen kilometres long. Ten nights here should be a slow holiday with a lot of swimming, not a ten-day itinerary.

Booking in the wrong order

Order is where a surprising number of Santorini mistakes begin. Fix the dates, then the flights, then the accommodation, then the boats, then the transfers, then the sightseeing days. Restaurants last. People routinely book a catamaran before they have booked a bed.

Not leaving a single unbooked day

One of the quieter Santorini mistakes is a schedule with no slack. Something will be cancelled by wind, or something will be good enough that you want longer at it. An empty slot absorbs both. Nobody has ever complained about a free afternoon on this island.

Assuming you can island-hop casually

Ferries are frequent in July and August and much thinner in the shoulder months, and all of them are subject to the wind. Two islands in a week is comfortable; three is a lot of packing and a real cancellation risk.

Ignoring the cruise schedule

A one-ship day and a five-ship day are different islands. The schedule is published. Plan your caldera-village time around the quiet days and you will avoid half the Santorini mistakes on this page without doing anything else.

What Are the Accommodation Mistakes?

Not asking how many steps

The complaint we hear more than any other, and the most avoidable of the accommodation Santorini mistakes. A good number of caldera hotels in Oia, Imerovigli and Firostefani sit fifty to eighty steps below the nearest road, and you carry your own luggage down them. The photographs never show the stair. Ask the property directly, in writing, before you book.

Assuming a vehicle can reach the door

Among the Santorini mistakes that only surface on arrival: many rim hotels have no vehicle access at all. Your driver gets as close as the lane allows and tells you the walk in advance – but only if you tell us where you are staying.

Booking a cave hotel for the pool

One of the family Santorini mistakes that only becomes obvious on day two. Cave hotels frequently have a plunge pool the size of a large bath. If you want to swim lengths, or you have children who want to be in water all day, stay on the coast. This is one of the Santorini mistakes that ruins whole family holidays.

Confusing “sea view” with “caldera view”

They are different products at very different prices, and confusing them is one of the costlier Santorini mistakes. Sea view means the open Aegean on the east side. Caldera view means the crater. Read the listing carefully.

Staying in Oia and expecting convenience

Oia is beautiful, expensive, twenty-five minutes from Fira, and full of steps. It is a wonderful place to stay for a honeymoon and a poor one for a family with a pushchair.

Staying on the rim for a whole week

You will pay two to three times the coastal rate and you will not swim. The best-value approach is to split: two or three nights on the rim, the rest on the coast or inland.

Ignoring the airport flight path

Kamari, Monolithos and Messaria are under it. In season that means early mornings.

Booking a winter room without asking about heating

Rooms built for August are not always well heated, and the wind here is persistent.

What Are the Transport Santorini Mistakes?

Expecting a taxi

Around thirty licensed taxis serve the entire island. At the airport in season, at the port after a ferry, or anywhere at all after dinner, you will not get one. Almost every transport-related Santorini mistake begins with this assumption.

Hiring a quad or a buggy

The most dangerous of the transport Santorini mistakes. Popular, cheap, and responsible for a great many holiday injuries. The roads are narrow, unlit at night, with no hard shoulder and loose gravel washed onto the bends. Helmets are compulsory and licences are checked.

Assuming your licence is enough

One of the Santorini mistakes you cannot fix after arriving: many non-EU licences require an International Driving Permit here and it is genuinely checked by rental companies and police. You cannot get one after you arrive.

Hiring a car for the whole week

Then paying to park it in Fira and Oia, and not drinking at the wineries. Three days of car plus a driver for the sightseeing day is usually cheaper and always easier.

Relying on buses for everything

KTEL is cheap and reliable, but every route changes at the station in Fira. A fifteen-minute journey becomes an hour, and evening services stop early. Buses are fine for Oia, Kamari, Perissa and the airport, and useless for Ancient Thira, the wineries and the inland villages.

Leaving the cable car until the end of a cruise call

The costliest of the cruise Santorini mistakes. The down queue is worse than the up queue, because several ships try to leave at once. Be back at the top ninety minutes before all-aboard, not thirty.

Riding a donkey up the cliff

588 unshaded steps, thirty-five degrees, and animals that have already done the climb several times that day. Take the cable car. Why we ask you not to.

Walking up the steps in August

Down is fine. Up, in summer, with no shade and donkey traffic on the same stair, is not.

Not booking an arrival transfer

You land or dock, and then you queue. A pre-booked driver with your name on a board removes the two worst moments of the trip. Transfers.

What Are the Sightseeing Mistakes?

Being in Fira or Oia at midday

Between eleven and five in summer, those two villages hold everyone who came off a ship plus everyone staying on the island. Go at seven in the morning or after seven in the evening. Of all the Santorini mistakes, this is the one that most changes how people describe the island afterwards.

The Oia castle sunset

Among the most photographed of all Santorini mistakes. Several thousand people arrive two hours early to hold a position on a ruined wall. The sun sets identically over Imerovigli, Firostefani, Pyrgos and the Akrotiri lighthouse, all of which are quiet. Imerovigli.

Planning both ends of the island in one day

Oia in the morning and Akrotiri in the afternoon is two hours in a vehicle on roads that were not built for it. Group each day into one corner: south, east, centre or north.

Skipping Akrotiri

Skipping this is one of the Santorini mistakes people only realise later. A Bronze Age town buried under ash in around 1600 BC, with paved streets, three-storey houses and drainage, under a modern roof. It is the best thing on the island after the caldera itself, it is shaded, and a surprising number of visitors skip it because “ruins” sounds dull. Akrotiri.

Visiting Akrotiri or Ancient Thira without a guide

One of the Santorini mistakes that makes people call a world-class site overrated. Neither site has meaningful signage. Without someone explaining it, a good deal of both reads as low walls, and people leave saying it was overrated.

Turning up at Ancient Thira in the afternoon

It closes in the early afternoon and one day a week in low season, and the exposed road up is occasionally wind-closed. Morning only. Ancient Thira.

Trying to do the volcano and Oia on the same day

Each is half a day. Together they are a day of transitions and nothing else.

Doing the caldera walk in the afternoon

Ten kilometres with no shade and very little water on the route. First light or late afternoon, never one o’clock.

Never leaving the rim

Pyrgos, Megalochori, Emporio, Exo Gonia and Vothonas are fifteen minutes inland, almost empty at midday, and where the island actually lives. Missing them is quietly one of the biggest Santorini mistakes, because nobody knows they made it. All 32 villages.

Booking six things a day

Three stops. The road does not negotiate.

What Are the Beach Mistakes?

Expecting white sand and shallow water

The beach Santorini mistakes all start here. Every beach here is volcanic: black, red or grey, with water that deepens sharply within a few metres. If you came for a soft sandy bay, you came to the wrong Cyclades island – Naxos does that far better.

Walking barefoot on black sand

By ten in the morning it is painful and by midday it will burn. Take something for your feet.

Assuming Red Beach is always open

Rockfall closes the access path periodically. Check on the day rather than driving down and finding a barrier. Red Beach.

Ignoring the wind

Ignoring wind direction is a small Santorini mistakes classic. The meltemi can make the south coast unswimmable on an afternoon when the east coast is calm. If Perivolos is churning, drive twenty minutes to Kamari.

Taking small children to a steeply shelving beach

Monolithos is the one the island’s own families use: shallow, sheltered, with playgrounds and shade. Monolithos.

Expecting the best swimming from the shore

It is not. The best swimming here is from a boat in the caldera, which is why the catamaran trips sell out.

What Are the Food and Money Mistakes?

Eating every dinner on the caldera rim

The most expensive of the everyday Santorini mistakes. You are paying for the view, and the view is free from the street outside. A taverna in Pyrgos, Megalochori, Exo Gonia or Emporio costs roughly a third and generally cooks better. Do the rim once, for the occasion, and eat inland the rest of the week.

Buying wine in a Fira gift shop

A minor entry on any list of Santorini mistakes, repeated thousands of times a season. The estates are fifteen minutes away, the same bottle is cheaper at the door, and they will crate and ship a case home for you.

Not carrying cash

Cards are taken almost everywhere, but the cable car, bakeries, small tavernas and boat fares all want notes. Running out of cash at the bottom of the cliff is a small but avoidable one of the classic Santorini mistakes.

Buying breakfast at the hotel

Every village has a bakery, they open early, and breakfast costs a fifth of a hotel buffet.

Drinking the tap water

The island runs largely on desalination. It is safe for teeth and washing; drink bottled.

Not booking a caldera-view table in season

The ones worth eating at fill several days ahead in July and August.

Assuming a service charge is a tip

Tipping is not obligatory in Greece. Rounding up is normal, ten percent is generous, and nobody expects twenty.

Missing the local food entirely

One of the sadder Santorini mistakes. Fava, tomatokeftedes, white aubergine, chloro cheese and capers all grow or are made here and nowhere much else. Eating club sandwiches on the rim for a week is a genuine loss.

What Are the Cruise Passenger Santorini Mistakes?

Believing the published call time

Subtract about two hours for tendering and the cable car queues in both directions. A nine-hour call is seven hours ashore.

Expecting a pier

There is none. The caldera is four hundred metres deep, ships anchor, and you come ashore by tender at the old port below Fira.

Expecting a vehicle at the quay

There is no road to the old port. Cable car, 588 steps or donkey, and drivers meet you at the top in Fira. Cruise guide.

Planning five stops

Two, and a lunch. This is the most common of the cruise Santorini mistakes and the one with the highest cost, because the penalty is a missed ship.

Forgetting ship time

Ships frequently run an hour off island time. Check before you go ashore.

Booking the ship excursion by default

The ship waits for its own coaches, which is worth something. It is also forty people, a fixed route, twenty minutes a stop and a vehicle that cannot reach several of the best places here. A private car is usually cheaper for a family and always goes further. Shore excursion.

Trying to reach Oia on a short call

On five or six hours ashore, Oia is the one thing you do, or you do not do it.

What Are the Practical and Safety Mistakes?

Underestimating the sun

There is essentially no natural shade anywhere on this island, and the breeze on the rim hides how strong the sun is. Hat, cream, water.

Wearing the wrong shoes

Marble lanes polished smooth by two million visitors a year, uneven archaeological sites and stepped paths everywhere. Sandals with no grip are among the most quietly costly Santorini mistakes, because a sprained ankle takes the rest of the week.

Driving tired or after a tasting

Unlit roads, no hard shoulder, and bends with gravel on them.

Travelling without insurance

The island has a health centre in Fira. Anything serious is flown to Athens.

Not checking site opening days

Archaeological sites close one day a week in low season and run short winter hours. A wasted drive is entirely avoidable.

Ignoring the wind forecast

It decides whether the boats run at all. Check the night before and have a land plan.

Assuming everything is open in winter

Akrotiri, the museums and the wineries are. The boats, the beach fronts and most of Oia are not. Santorini in winter.

What Are the Santorini Mistakes by Traveller Type?

Honeymooners

Booking Oia over Imerovigli. The classic honeymoon entry on any list of Santorini mistakes. Twice the price, more crowds, and a shorter walk to the same view from Imerovigli, which is higher and quieter.

Over-booking the week. The single most common of the honeymoon Santorini mistakes. You are not going to see everything and you did not come to.

Every dinner on the rim. By night four you will want a taverna in a village.

Not booking the private boat. A semi-private catamaran is twelve strangers. The upgrade is one of the few here that consistently earns its money.

Families

Staying on the caldera. The family Santorini mistakes usually start here. Steps, no pool worth the name, and nowhere to swim. Kamari, Perissa or Monolithos instead.

Using buses with small children. Everything changes in Fira, and Fira in August is not a place to wait with a pushchair.

Midday sightseeing. Akrotiri is roofed, the wine museum is underground, and the beach is for the afternoon.

Assuming the beaches are safe for toddlers. Most shelve steeply. Monolithos does not.

Cruise passengers

Covered in full above; in short, subtract two hours, pick two stops, and be back at the cable car early.

Backpackers and budget travellers

Assuming the whole island is expensive. It is not. Karterados, Messaria and Perissa are ordinary Greek prices, the villages are cheap to eat in, and the best thing here – the caldera walk – is free.

Eating where the view is. The most reliable way to spend a budget in two days.

Repeat visitors

Doing the first trip again. Ancient Thira, Thirasia, the wineries, Emporio and the far south are a completely different island, and the classic Santorini mistakes of a second visit are all forms of nostalgia.

Older travellers and limited mobility

Booking a caldera hotel. Steps, uneven marble and no vehicle access.

Assuming the cable car solves the cliff. It does, but the lanes at the top do not level out.

Not telling the operator in advance. Akrotiri is roofed and largely level and Vlychada marina is flat. A day can be built around that, but only if we know.

What Are the Etiquette Mistakes?

Photographing inside private property

Terraces, courtyards and rooftops in Oia and Imerovigli are people’s homes and hotel rooms. A great many of the Santorini mistakes that annoy residents come down to this one.

Wearing beachwear in villages and churches

Among the etiquette Santorini mistakes that residents actually notice. Fine at Perissa, not fine in Pyrgos, and definitely not in a church. Shoulders and knees covered inside religious buildings.

Turning up at a taverna at seven and complaining it is empty

Greek dinner is nine. Restaurants that look dead at seven are full at ten, and the ones that are busy at seven are cooking for tourists.

Blocking a lane for a photograph

People are getting to work through those lanes on foot, with deliveries, all summer.

Arguing with a taxi driver about availability

There genuinely are only about thirty of them. It is not personal.

Treating the island as a set

Fifteen thousand people live here all year, most of them nowhere near the caldera. The village you are photographing is somebody’s street.

How Do You Avoid All of This?

Six habits, and between them they prevent almost every one of the Santorini mistakes listed on this page.

1. Be out before nine. The single highest-value decision anyone makes here. Empty villages, cool air, parking, and the light photographers come for.

2. Go inland between eleven and five. Pyrgos, Megalochori, Emporio, the wineries and roofed Akrotiri are all quiet exactly when the rim is not.

3. Three stops a day. Not four. Group them by corner of the island.

4. Eat away from the view. Halves the food bill and improves the food.

5. Book the fixed things first. Boats, sites with closing times, and transfers. Everything else moves around them.

6. Leave one day empty. Weather will take an afternoon, or something will be good enough to stay at.

Follow those and the Santorini mistakes on this page mostly cannot happen to you. Ignore them and you will have the version of this island that people complain about online, which is a real version and an avoidable one.

What Are the Photography Mistakes?

Shooting Oia at midday

The commonest of the photography Santorini mistakes. Flat overhead light, white walls blown out, and several hundred people in every frame. Oia before seven in the morning is a different village and the only time the blue domes are clear.

Standing where everyone else stands

The famous three-dome view has a queue. Imerovigli with Skaros in the foreground, Firostefani’s campanile in late afternoon, Pyrgos from the castle and Vlychada in flat light are all better and all empty.

Trespassing for the shot

Many of the terraces and rooftops in Oia are private property and people live behind them. This is one of the Santorini mistakes that makes residents dislike visitors, and it is entirely unnecessary.

Never shooting from the water

The caldera only makes sense from inside it. A catamaran gives you the one angle a land-based visitor never gets.

Missing the winter light

Low sun, long shadows, dramatic cloud and no people. Serious photographers come in January for exactly this.

What Do People Get Right?

Worth saying, because a list of Santorini mistakes reads like a warning and this island genuinely rewards visitors.

Booking a boat. Almost nobody regrets the catamaran.

Going to a winery. The ungrafted basket vines and the saline Assyrtiko are unlike anything else in Europe. Wine tour.

Getting up early once. One sunrise on the rim is worth three sunsets in a crowd.

Taking a guide to Akrotiri. Universally reported as the thing that changed the visit.

Eating inland. Everyone who does it says so afterwards.

Leaving a day empty. The most-mentioned day of the trip, every time.

What Are the Seasonal Mistakes?

Spring

Assuming the sea is warm. In April and May it is not, whatever the air temperature says. Come for the walking, the sites and the wildflowers.

Summer

Planning an outdoor midday. It does not work in July and August; the roofed sites and the inland villages are the answer between eleven and four.

Autumn

Assuming everything runs to the end of October. Boats and beach fronts thin out through the second half of the month.

Winter

Turning up without checking what is open, and booking a same-day onward connection when winter flights are cancelled several times a season.

Easter

Assuming it is a quiet shoulder week. Greek Easter is the biggest event of the year and the island fills with Greek visitors.

What Is the Single Biggest Mistake?

Trying to do too much. Every other item on this page is a detail; this one is the shape of the whole trip.

The island is eighteen kilometres long and it looks like an afternoon on a map. In practice the roads follow the contours of a collapsed volcano, every bus route changes in Fira, there are thirty taxis, and the two villages everyone wants to see are full for six hours a day. A realistic day holds three stops.

Visitors who plan three stops a day come home describing the caldera, a meal and a sunset. Visitors who plan six come home describing a minibus. That is the difference, and almost all the Santorini mistakes on this page are variations of it.

The second biggest is closely related: never leaving the caldera rim. Half the island – the inland villages, the wineries, the archaeology, the food – is fifteen minutes from Fira and almost nobody goes there.

What Do Visitors Regret Most Afterwards?

Different from the Santorini mistakes themselves. These are the things people say once they are home, when it is too late to fix.

Not staying longer

Almost universal among people who came for two or three nights. The island rewards a slower trip and nobody has ever said they wished they had left sooner.

Not getting up early even once

The single most repeated regret, and the easiest of all the Santorini mistakes to fix. One sunrise on the caldera path, or Oia at half past six, is the memory everybody wishes they had. It costs nothing but an alarm.

Not going inland

Visitors who spent the whole trip between Fira and Oia find out afterwards that Pyrgos, Megalochori and Emporio existed fifteen minutes away, and that the food there was better and cheaper. Of all the Santorini mistakes this is the one people learn about from someone else’s photographs.

Not booking the boat

The caldera only makes sense from inside it. People who skipped the catamaran to save money almost always mention it.

Taking a guide only at the end

Those who did Akrotiri unguided and then took a guide at Ancient Thira invariably wish they had done it the other way round.

Not eating properly

A week of rim restaurants and no fava, no tomatokeftedes, no white aubergine, no chloro. The island’s food is genuinely distinct and it is easy to miss entirely.

Rushing the last day

Packing a final morning full of stops and then sitting in an airport. Better to keep the last morning empty and use it on a terrace.

What Does It Cost to Get It Wrong?

Concrete numbers, because “avoid these Santorini mistakes” is easy to nod at and hard to act on.

A missed flight after a cancelled ferry. A new one-way ticket in August, plus a night’s accommodation you had not planned. Easily the most expensive item on this page.

Seven caldera dinners instead of three. Roughly the price of a private full-day tour, spent on the same food with a better view.

A week of caldera accommodation instead of a split stay. Frequently more than the flights cost.

A hire car for seven days plus parking, when three days and one driven day would have done.

An hour lost in the cable car queue, twice, on a seven-hour cruise call. That is a third of your time ashore.

A quad accident. Excess, medical costs, and the rest of the holiday.

A day lost to a closed site you drove to on its closing day.

None of these are dramatic and all of them are ordinary. The Santorini mistakes that actually cost money are boring ones, which is precisely why they keep happening.

Why Do These Santorini Mistakes Happen at All?

The Santorini mistakes on this page are not carelessness. Almost every one of them comes from a reasonable assumption that happens to be wrong on this particular island.

The map lies about scale

Eighteen kilometres long looks like nothing. But the island is the rim of a collapsed volcano, so the roads climb, switchback and go the long way round almost everywhere. A twelve-kilometre journey can take thirty-five minutes. Every over-packed itinerary starts here.

The photographs are all taken at the same hour

Everything you have seen of Oia was shot between six and eight in the morning or at sunset. Nobody photographs the eleven o’clock queue, so nobody expects it.

The island reads as a resort and behaves as a working place

Fifteen thousand people live here. Bus routes are built for residents, taxis are licensed for a small population, and the archaeological sites run on state hours rather than tourist ones. A great many Santorini mistakes are visitors applying package-resort assumptions to a working Greek island.

The weather looks reliable

It is, for sunshine. It is not for wind, and weather-related Santorini mistakes almost all come from that gap. and wind is what cancels the boats and the ferries. Nothing in a weather app prepares people for the meltemi.

The two famous villages absorb all the attention

Oia and Fira take up the entire image of the island, so visitors plan around them and never discover that the other thirty villages exist. The result is the most common invisible mistake of all: a perfectly good week spent on ten percent of the island.

Advice online is written by people who came once

Most of it is honest and most of it is from a single trip in July, which is why the same Santorini mistakes keep circulating. It repeats the things that are easy to see and misses the things you only learn by being here in February as well as August.

What Would We Tell a Friend?

If a friend rang and said they had five days here next June, avoiding every one of these Santorini mistakes, the whole conversation would be about six sentences long.

Stay two nights on the rim at Firostefani or Imerovigli and three on the coast. Be out before nine every day and go inland when the sun is high. Book the boat and the transfers now and nothing else. Take a guide to Akrotiri. Eat in the villages. Leave one day completely empty.

That is it. Every item on this page of Santorini mistakes is a longer explanation of one of those six sentences, and a visitor who follows them will not need the rest of it.

The island is genuinely one of the great places in the Mediterranean. It is also one of the easiest to get wrong, because the version in the photographs exists for about two hours a day and the rest of the time you have to know where to be.

A Quick Santorini Mistakes Checklist

Print it, screenshot it, or ignore it. Every line is a mistake somebody made last week.

Before you book. Have you left a day between any ferry and any flight? Have you asked the hotel how many steps? Have you checked whether a vehicle can reach it? Have you looked at the cruise ship schedule for your dates? Have you booked the boat before the restaurants?

Before you fly. Do you have an International Driving Permit if your licence needs one? Do you have travel insurance? Do you have shoes with grip? Have you checked which day the archaeological sites close?

On the island. Are you out before nine? Are you inland between eleven and five? Are you doing three stops, not six? Are you eating away from the rim? Do you have cash for the cable car? Have you looked at the wind forecast?

If you are on a ship. Have you subtracted two hours from the call time? Are you back at the cable car ninety minutes before all-aboard? Have you picked two stops rather than five? Do you know whether your ship is on island time?

Before you leave. Have you been out for one sunrise? Have you been to one village that is not Fira or Oia? Have you had one meal that was not on the caldera? Have you had one day with nothing booked?

Anyone who can answer those honestly has avoided essentially every one of the Santorini mistakes on this page, and will have a considerably better week than the average visitor. That is the entire point of writing it down.

None of this requires spending more money. Most of it saves money. The Santorini mistakes that cost the most are the ones made at the booking stage, months before anyone arrives, and every one of them is reversible with a single email at the right moment.

What Does the Corrected Version Look Like?

Three worked plans that avoid all the Santorini mistakes above, so the advice is not purely negative.

A corrected three-day trip

Day 1. Arrive, drop bags, walk the rim from Fira to Firostefani and Imerovigli, sunset from Imerovigli rather than Oia, dinner in Fira after nine.

Day 2. Akrotiri at half past eight with a guide, the lighthouse at eleven, lunch in Megalochori at half past twelve, a winery at two, Pyrgos castle at half past three, Oia at six when the excursions have gone.

Day 3. A catamaran from Vlychada, five hours, back for a late dinner. Nothing else booked.

A corrected week

Two or three nights on the rim, then move to Kamari or Perissa. Add Ancient Thira in the morning, three wineries in an afternoon, the Fira to Oia walk at first light, and two entirely unbooked days. That plan contains none of the Santorini mistakes on this page and it is not a demanding week.

A corrected cruise day

First tender ashore, cable car up before the queue, met at the top at nine. Akrotiri, then lunch inland, then Oia. Back at the top of the cable car by four, ninety minutes before all-aboard. Two stops and a meal, and you will have seen more than the coach party who tried for five.

Santorini Mistakes: Frequently Asked Questions

What is the biggest of the Santorini mistakes? Trying to do too much. The island looks small on a map but the roads follow a collapsed volcano and a realistic day holds three stops, not six.

Is visiting in August one of the Santorini mistakes? Not exactly, but it is the hardest month: thirty-five degrees, five cruise ships a day, the strongest wind and peak prices. May, June, September and early October are better in every respect except school holidays.

Should I stay in Oia? Only if you want the view more than convenience and you have checked how many steps there are. Imerovigli and Firostefani give a similar view for less, and the coast gives you swimming.

Can I connect a ferry to a flight on the same day? No. This is the most expensive of all Santorini mistakes. Wind cancels sailings at short notice.

Do I need a car? Not for a short stay. For a week away from Fira, either a car for part of it or a private driver for the sightseeing days. A car for the full week means parking problems and no wine.

Are taxis really that scarce? Yes. Around thirty licensed cars for the whole island, and none available at the airport, the port or after dinner in season.

Is the Oia sunset worth it? The sunset is; the crowd is not. Imerovigli, Firostefani, Pyrgos and the Akrotiri lighthouse all give you the same sun and almost nobody else.

Why do people say the beaches are disappointing? Because they expect white sand. They are black, red or grey volcanic beaches with steeply shelving water, and they are dramatic rather than soft.

Is Akrotiri worth it? It is the best thing on the island after the caldera. Take a guide; without one the site has almost no signage.

How many days should I stay? Three minimum, five ideal, seven comfortable.

Is Santorini too expensive? The caldera rim is. Sleeping inland or on the coast and eating in the villages roughly halves the cost of the same trip.

What should I not miss? Akrotiri with a guide, one winery, one boat, and one morning where you are out before the island wakes up.

Let Us Plan Around Them

We are a local operator, based on the island, running private tours and transfers in our own vehicles. Most of the Santorini mistakes on this page are things we spend the working week quietly steering guests away from: the midday rim, the six-stop plan, the caldera dinner, the missing hour at the cable car.

Tell us your dates, where you are staying, how you are arriving and what you have already booked, and we will build the days around the island rather than against it. Prices are per vehicle rather than per person, so a family of four pays what a couple pays. Hotel pickup is included, flights and ferries are tracked rather than assumed, and an 80 EUR deposit confirms a date.

See the full list of tours, the personalised tour, or the FAQ.

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

September 3, 2026 By Stelios Karamolegkos

Santorini Activities – The Complete List

The best private tours and activities to join in Santorini

The best santorini activities are the caldera villages, the Bronze Age town at Akrotiri, a catamaran into the volcano crater, the wineries and the walk from Fira to Oia. Three of them a day is the right number, because the island is small but the roads are slow.

Would you like for your every moment of your vacation in Santorini to be full of fascinating experiences? Santorini tours can organize Santorini Tours. We can offer you dream trips full of fun and sea tours especially for you and your company.

What could be more pleasant than meeting every interesting corner of the place that you choose to travel to, finding out its unique qualities, and letting your eyes capture great scenery? A Santorini private guided tour can take you to the most beautiful corners of that island, which magnetize the senses!

Santorini historical private tours

The most fascinating way for you to acquire a complete point of view of Santorini and to get to know it’s historic side by taking place to field trips by Santorini historical private tours and sea tours which are planned by Santorinitours throughout the whole island by Santorini private transfers.

Santorini sightseeing private tours

We provide a wide variety of field trips around Santorini and allow you to admire the great sights of Santorini during Santorini sightseeing private transfers. We also organize sea tours to the volcanic islands that will astonish you. You can also choose a private tour or a semi-private tour depending on your desires and budget.

With Santorinitours you also have the chance to choose sea tours and create your own exclusive tour package which will offer you moments of genuine fun and recreation with family, your friends or your better half.

Santorini wine tours

If you would like to have some special and romantic moments with your other half, book a private tour in Santorini to taste the original wine of the special vineyards of Santorini.

See more about vacations in Santorini island:

Santorini Activities: The Complete List

Santorini activities fall into four groups: the water, the archaeology, the wine, and the walking. Almost everything worth doing on this island sits in one of those four, and the mistake most visitors make is spending three days entirely inside the first one they discover.

The island is eighteen kilometres long and eight hundred metres wide at its narrowest. That sounds small, and it is, but the roads follow the contours of a volcano and nothing takes as little time as the map suggests. A realistic day holds three stops, not six. Plan your santorini activities around that number and you will enjoy all of them; plan around six and you will remember a car park.

What follows is every activity on the island that is worth your time, what each one actually involves, how long it takes, roughly what it costs, and who it suits. We run these tours ourselves, so the timings are the real ones rather than the brochure ones.

What Are the Best Santorini Activities?

If you have one day: the caldera villages, Akrotiri, and a sunset somewhere that is not Oia. If you have two: add a catamaran or the volcano. If you have three: add the wineries and one long walk. Those are the santorini activities that consistently produce the best days, in that order.

The single most underrated activity on the island is the walk from Fira to Oia along the caldera rim. The single most overrated is queuing on the castle steps in Oia for a sunset you can see better, and quieter, from four other places.

What Are the Best Water-Based Things to Do?

The caldera is a drowned volcanic crater four hundred metres deep, and the water inside it is the reason half the santorini activities on this list exist.

Catamaran cruise

The best-selling of all santorini activities. Five hours, usually with lunch cooked on board, swimming stops at the hot springs and one or two of the coloured beaches. Semi-private boats take up to twelve; private charters take your party alone. This is the single most popular of all the santorini activities and it deserves to be. Book the afternoon departure if you want the sunset from the water, the morning one if you want the sea to yourself.

Volcano and hot springs

Boats leave the old port below Fira for Nea Kameni, the black cinder island in the middle of the caldera. A thirty-minute climb over loose scoria takes you to the crater rim, where the ground is warm and smells of sulphur. Most trips then anchor off Palia Kameni so you can swim into the rust-coloured warm water. Half a day, and one of the few santorini activities that is genuinely geological rather than scenic. Nea Kameni · Palia Kameni.

Sea kayaking

Three to four hours along the south coast, usually from Akrotiri towards the lighthouse, with snorkelling in a sea cave and a picnic on a beach you cannot reach by road. Physically easy but you are exposed to the sun the whole time.

Scuba diving and snorkelling

The caldera walls drop almost vertically, so the diving here is wall diving with very good visibility and comparatively little marine life. There is a small wreck near Palia Kameni. Discover-scuba sessions run daily in season for people who have never dived.

Thirasia

The island across the caldera, which is what Santorini was before the tourists. One village at the top of a stair, a handful of tavernas, and almost nobody. Boats run from Ammoudi and from Athinios. Half a day, and the best of the quiet santorini activities. Thirasia.

Swimming from a boat

Worth saying plainly: the water inside the caldera is deep, clear and cold, and the best swimming on the island is from a boat rather than from any beach.

Which Ones Happen On Land?

The land-based santorini activities are where the island stops being a postcard and starts being a place with four thousand years of history on it.

Akrotiri

A Bronze Age town buried by the eruption of around 1600 BC and preserved under metres of ash: paved streets, three-storey houses, drainage, frescoes. It sits under a modern roof, which makes it the only major site on the island that is comfortable at midday in August. Allow ninety minutes. Of all the santorini activities this is the one people are most surprised by. Akrotiri.

Ancient Thira

A Greek, Hellenistic and Roman city strung along a ridge eight hundred feet above Kamari, with a theatre looking out over the open sea. The road up is a series of hairpins that large coaches cannot use. It closes in the early afternoon, so it has to be a morning activity. Ancient Thira.

Wine tasting

Santorini’s vines are ungrafted, grown in volcanic ash without irrigation, and trained into low woven baskets called kouloura to shelter the fruit from the wind. There is nothing else like them in Europe. Assyrtiko is the grape, Vinsanto the sweet wine, and three estates in an afternoon is the right number. Among all santorini activities this is the one that most rewards having a driver. Wine tour.

The caldera walk, Fira to Oia

The best free entry on any list of santorini activities. Ten kilometres along the rim, three to four hours, past Firostefani, Imerovigli and the rock of Skaros. There is no shade and very little water on the route, so it is a morning or late-afternoon walk. It is free, and it is the best thing on this page. Imerovigli.

Cooking classes

Three to four hours, usually at a family kitchen or a farm inland, working with the island’s own ingredients: white aubergine, capers, fava, cherry tomatoes that grow without water. Ends with lunch. Food experience.

Horse riding

Along the black sand at Vlychada and Perivolos, or inland through the vineyards. Sunset rides are the popular ones and they book out. Horse riding.

The Akrotiri lighthouse

The far south-western tip, twenty minutes past Akrotiri on a road that ends at a gate. Nobody is there. The sunset from the cliff beside it faces the whole caldera and Thirasia. Akrotiri lighthouse.

Museums

The Museum of Prehistoric Thera in Fira holds the frescoes and finds from Akrotiri, which is where they went after excavation. Small, air-conditioned, and it makes the site itself twice as good. The Wine Museum at Koutsoyannopoulos is underground in a cave, and the Maritime Museum in Oia is in an old shipowner’s house.

Photo walks

A guided early-morning circuit of the blue domes, the Skaros trail and the Oia lanes, before the streets fill. Six in the morning in Oia is a completely different island.

What About the Beaches?

The beach santorini activities are not what people expect. There is no white sand here. The volcano decides the colour of every beach on the island, and the water is deep almost immediately.

Perissa and Perivolos

Seven kilometres of black sand on the south-east coast, with the best organised beach fronts on the island: loungers, beach bars, water sports and somewhere to eat every hundred metres. Perissa · Perivolos.

Kamari

Black pebble rather than sand, under the cliff of Ancient Thira, with a long promenade and an open-air cinema. Easier for families than Perissa because the water shelves less sharply. Kamari.

Red Beach

Iron-red cliffs above a small cove near Akrotiri. Dramatic, photogenic and subject to rockfall, so check what is open before you go. Red Beach.

White Beach

Reachable only by boat from Akrotiri, which is exactly why it is worth it. White Beach.

Vlychada

Wind-carved grey cliffs that look like a lunar landscape, a marina, and the fewest people of any organised beach. Vlychada.

Monolithos

The one the island’s own families use. Shallow, sheltered, playgrounds, and the airport runway on the other side of the road. Monolithos.

What to know before you go

Black sand reaches painful temperatures by ten in the morning, so take something for your feet. Most beaches shelve steeply. The meltemi wind can make the south coast unswimmable on a given afternoon while the east coast is calm.

Which Villages Are Worth Building a Day Around?

Half the santorini activities on this page happen in a village rather than at a site, and the island has thirty-two of them. These are the ones that change a day.

Oia

The blue domes, the Ammoudi steps down to the fish tavernas, and the most photographed street in Greece. Go before eight or after seven. Oia.

Fira

The capital, the museums, the cable car and the bus station. Everything routes through it, which is both its use and its problem. Fira.

Imerovigli

The highest point on the caldera rim and the start of the Skaros scramble. Quieter than both its neighbours and better placed than either.

Pyrgos

A medieval hill village with a Venetian castle at the top and the whole island underneath it. Fifteen minutes from Fira and a fraction of the crowd.

Megalochori

Bell towers, cave houses, walled captains’ mansions and two of the best wineries on the island within walking distance. Megalochori.

Emporio

The largest village on the island and the least visited, built as a defensive kastelli with lanes designed to confuse pirates. They still confuse visitors. Emporio.

Finikia and Vothonas

Two small inland villages built into ravines, with cave churches and almost no traffic. Among the quietest santorini activities available, and both are free. All 32 villages.

What Should You Eat and Where?

Eating is one of the santorini activities nobody books and everybody does. because the volcanic soil produces things that grow nowhere else in Greece.

Fava. Yellow split pea puree with capers and onion, the island’s signature dish and protected by origin.

Tomatokeftedes. Fritters made from the tiny Santorini cherry tomato, which grows with no irrigation at all.

White aubergine. Sweeter and less bitter than the purple kind, and grown almost nowhere else.

Chloro cheese. Fresh, soft goat cheese made on the island and rarely exported off it.

Fresh fish at Ammoudi. At the bottom of three hundred steps below Oia, on the water. Go down for a late lunch rather than at sunset.

Where to eat. Inland, almost always. A taverna in Pyrgos, Megalochori or Exo Gonia costs a third of the caldera rim and cooks better. The view is what you are paying for in Fira and Oia, and the view is free from the street outside. Food and wine experience.

What Else Is There?

A few santorini activities that do not fit the categories above but are worth knowing about.

Day trip to Ios or Naxos. Fast ferries make a long day possible in season, though the wind can strand you.

Open-air cinema at Kamari. Films under the stars in a garden, from late May.

Wedding and engagement photography. The reason a good proportion of visitors come at all, and the reason Oia is full at six in the morning.

Astronomy. Very little light pollution once you are inland, and the Milky Way is visible from the road above Emporio on a clear night.

Yoga and retreats. Several run on the caldera rim through spring and autumn.

Doing nothing. Genuinely one of the best santorini activities. One unbooked day, a rented terrace and the caldera in front of you, and you will remember it longer than the boat trip.

Where Should You Watch the Sunset?

Sunset is the one item on every list of santorini activities that everyone books and the one most often got wrong. Oia is famous, and on a July evening several thousand people watch it from the castle ruins, arriving two hours early to hold a position. The sunset itself is no better there than from anywhere else on the western rim.

Imerovigli. Higher than Oia, half the people, and Skaros rock in the foreground.

Akrotiri lighthouse. The whole caldera in one frame, and almost nobody.

Firostefani. Ten minutes’ walk from Fira and immediately quieter.

Pyrgos. The highest village, looking down on the whole island rather than out at the water. Pyrgos.

From a catamaran. The only version where you are looking back at the island instead of away from it.

Oia, if you must. Be in place by ninety minutes before, or watch from Ammoudi below instead. Sunset tour.

Which Santorini Activities Suit Which Season?

Season changes which santorini activities are worth booking more than most people realise.

April and May

The best months for walking, archaeology and wine. The caldera path is green, the sites are empty and the light is soft. The sea is too cold for comfortable swimming and some boat trips have not started.

June

Everything is open, the sea has warmed, and it is not yet unbearable. The strongest month overall for santorini activities.

July and August

Water activities only, realistically, plus roofed Akrotiri. Thirty-five degrees and no shade makes the caldera walk and Ancient Thira genuinely unpleasant. The meltemi wind can cancel boats at short notice.

September

The warmest sea of the year with far fewer people. Wine harvest is over but the estates are open. Many people’s favourite month.

October

Walking weather returns and prices drop. Boat trips thin out towards the end of the month.

November to March

The island belongs to the four thousand people who live here. Akrotiri, the museums and the wineries stay open on winter hours; the boats, most beach fronts and a good share of the restaurants do not. The santorini activities that survive the winter are the ones that were never about the weather.

Which Ones Suit Your Trip?

Families with young children

The santorini activities that work with children are Monolithos beach, the volcano boat, a cooking class and Akrotiri. Skip the caldera walk and the donkey steps.

Couples

Catamaran with the sunset, a wine tour, dinner in Pyrgos or Ammoudi.

First-time visitors

Caldera villages, Akrotiri, one beach and one sunset that is not Oia. That is the island in a day and a half.

Second and third visits

Ancient Thira, Thirasia, the wineries and the inland villages. Almost none of the santorini activities you did the first time.

Walkers

Fira to Oia, the Skaros scramble, and the path from Kamari up to Ancient Thira.

Photographers

Oia before seven, Imerovigli at sunset, Vlychada in flat afternoon light and Pyrgos from the castle.

Cruise passengers

You have five to nine hours and two cable car queues to spend them on. Pick two santorini activities, not five. Shore excursion.

Limited mobility

Akrotiri is roofed and largely level, the Vlychada marina is flat, and a private vehicle removes most of the rest of the problem. Ancient Thira, Skaros and the caldera lanes are not realistic.

What Do Santorini Activities Cost?

Most santorini activities are cheaper than the hotel you are staying in. Rough guidance, per person unless noted, in high season.

Akrotiri entry – a modest site fee, and a combined ticket covers Ancient Thira and the museums.

Ancient Thira entry – the same order of money, and included in that combined ticket.

Museum of Prehistoric Thera – a few euro.

Wine tasting – a small fee per estate, frequently waived against a purchase.

Semi-private catamaran – the single largest line on most people’s budget, and worth it.

Private catamaran charter – several times that, and split between a family it is closer than you would think.

Volcano and hot springs boat – a half-day excursion price.

Sea kayak – similar, with the picnic included.

Cooking class – roughly a good dinner, and you eat it.

Caldera walk – free.

Private vehicle and driver – priced per vehicle rather than per head, from 220 EUR for a personalised tour. This is why families run their santorini activities privately rather than in groups. All tours and prices.

How Do You Book Santorini Activities Without Wasting a Day?

Most of the santorini activities on this page are bookable independently, and most people book them in the wrong order. The order matters more than the choice.

Book the fixed things first

Boats and cooking classes run on set departures and sell out. Fix those dates before anything else, because everything flexible can be arranged around them. Ancient Thira closes in the early afternoon, so it is fixed too.

Then build the driving days around them

Anything on wheels – villages, wineries, beaches, archaeological sites – can be moved. Group the santorini activities that sit in the same corner of the island into the same day: the south for Akrotiri, Red Beach and the lighthouse, the east for Kamari and Ancient Thira, the middle for Pyrgos, Megalochori and the wineries.

Never plan two ends of the island in one day

Oia in the morning and Akrotiri in the afternoon means two hours in a vehicle on roads that are not built for it. Split them across two days and you get both properly.

Leave the last afternoon empty

Something will be cancelled by wind, or something will be so good you want longer at it. An empty slot absorbs both without costing you anything.

Do not book santorini activities back to back

A five-hour boat is a whole day once you count the drive to the marina, the return and the tiredness afterwards. It is not a morning.

Check the wind forecast the night before

The meltemi decides whether the water-based santorini activities happen at all in July and August. The operator will usually call you, but knowing yourself means you can move to a land day instead of losing one.

Ask what is actually included

Site entry, lunch and hotel pickup are included in some santorini activities and not others, and the difference is often larger than the difference in headline price.

Use one operator where you can

The value of running your santorini activities through a single local operator is that somebody is holding the whole week rather than one afternoon of it, and can move the pieces when the weather changes. That is what we do.

How Do You Fit It All Into One, Two or Three Days?

One day

Three santorini activities and one drive. Morning: Akrotiri, then Red Beach or the lighthouse. Afternoon: Pyrgos and Megalochori. Evening: sunset from Imerovigli. That is three santorini activities and one drive, and it works.

Two days

Day one as above. Day two: a catamaran from Vlychada, five hours, back in time for dinner in Fira.

Three days

Add Ancient Thira in the morning while it is cool, three wineries in the afternoon, and the walk from Fira to Oia at first light on the last day.

Four days or more

Thirasia, a cooking class, a second beach, and one day where you book nothing at all. Very few visitors give themselves that day and everyone who does mentions it afterwards.

The rule that governs all of it

Three stops a day. Not six. The santorini activities you remember will be the ones you did not rush.

What Can You Safely Skip?

Two or three santorini activities are actively worth avoiding.

The donkey ride up the cliff. The animals work in thirty-five degree heat carrying loads well above the recommended limit. Take the cable car.

The Oia castle sunset in August. Several thousand people, arriving two hours early, for a view you can have in peace from Imerovigli.

Fira at midday on a multi-ship day. Go inland and come back at six.

A hire quad. Popular, and responsible for a great many holiday injuries on roads with no hard shoulder.

Booking six things in a day. The most common mistake on this list.

Wine bought in a Fira gift shop. The estates are fifteen minutes away and cheaper at the door.

What Should You Know Before You Book?

Small things that decide whether your santorini activities go smoothly.

Book boats early. Catamarans in July and August sell out days ahead.

Check the wind. The meltemi cancels sailings at short notice, and the operator will usually tell you the night before.

Site hours. Ancient Thira closes in the early afternoon; Akrotiri stays open later. Both close one day a week in low season.

Water and shade. There is essentially no natural shade anywhere on this island.

Shoes. The archaeological sites are uneven and the caldera lanes are marble worn smooth.

Cash. Cards are widely accepted; the cable car, small tavernas and boat fares want notes.

Tap water. Desalinated. Drink bottled.

Getting between santorini activities. Buses all route through Fira, taxis are famously scarce, and a private vehicle is what most people end up wishing they had booked. Our vehicles · Transfers.

Santorini Activities: Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best santorini activities for a first visit? The caldera villages, Akrotiri, one beach and a sunset from Imerovigli rather than Oia. Add a catamaran if you have a second day.

How many days do you need? Three is comfortable, two is enough, one is possible if you accept three stops and no more.

Is Santorini good for families? Yes, with a vehicle. Monolithos beach, the volcano boat and a cooking class all work well with children.

Do I need a guide for Akrotiri? It makes a large difference. The site has almost no signage and without a guide a good deal of it reads as low walls.

What is the best month? June and September. April, May and October are quieter and cheaper; July and August are hot and crowded.

Can I do santorini activities without hiring a car? Yes, but everything routes through the bus station in Fira, which turns a fifteen-minute journey into an hour.

Is the Fira to Oia walk hard? Not technically, but it is ten kilometres with no shade and very little water. Start early.

Are the beaches good? They are black, volcanic and deep, which is a different thing from good. The best swimming is from a boat.

Is the volcano trip worth it? Yes, if you want geology. No, if you want a beach day.

Is Santorini worth visiting in winter? For the sites, the wine and the quiet, yes. For the boats and the beaches, no.

How much should I budget? One paid activity a day plus food is the shape most people settle into.

Are your tours private? Always. Your party alone in the vehicle, priced per vehicle rather than per person.

Book Your Santorini Activities With Us

We build private days around whichever of these santorini activities you actually want, in the order that makes the island work rather than the order a brochure lists them. Tell us your dates, how many of you there are and what you have already booked, and we will fit the rest around it.

Prices are per vehicle, so a family of four pays what a couple pays. Hotel pickup anywhere on the island is included, an 80 EUR deposit confirms the date, and the balance is paid on the day. Guiding is available in twelve languages.

We have been running santorini activities on this island for more than a decade, in every month of the year and in most weather, and the plan we give you is the one we would use ourselves on the same dates.

Start with the full list of tours, or read the FAQ for the questions guests ask before booking. If you already know what you want, the personalised tour is the one to ask about.

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

May 22, 2023 By Stelios Karamolegkos

How to spend 24 hours in Santorini 2023?

You wonder how to spend 24 hours in Santorini 2023? Santorini, built at the southern end of the Cyclades complex, with its aura bringing spring smells and aromas from the Aegean sea, with cobbled streets and traditional houses with domes and arches, picturesque churches and great archaeological sites, with excellent nightlife and gastronomy, was, is and will remain the island you will fall in love with at first sight.

With a flight from Athens early in the morning, after about 45 minutes, you will land at the airport of Santorini, where from the first moment, the frame of endless blue with a white background will begin to unfold in front of you. Make sure, in case you decide to travel by plane, that you make a reservation several days in advance for a means of transport, so that you can explore this impressive island at your comfort.

9 a.m.

You must have heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. If you are not convinced yet, we guarantee you with absolute certainty that a morning with a view of the endless blue of the sky and the sea will give you the necessary energy and mental supplies for the rest of the day. So start your day at one of the many remarkable Brunch Restaurants, either in Fira or Imerovigli and get energy for the rest of the day.

11 a.m.

For a morning swim, you can initially start from the beautiful beach of Perissa, which stretches across the southeastern part of the island. The beach of Perissa is an organized seaside resort with a lot of tourist traffic, known for its fine black sand.

1 p.m.

You have to visit Red Beach. This charming beach will seduce you with its wild beauty. The black pebbles and wild rocks combined with the red sand make up a landscape of special beauty, reminding you that this island was created by volcanic eruptions. Alternatively, you can choose the equally beautiful beach at Kamari, which is a modern tourist resort with a cosmopolitan character, where the wide sandy beach is its main and beautiful feature.

3 p.m.

Time to eat! You should have lunch at Pyrgos. It is a traditional village, attraction for many tourists, built amphitheatrically on a hill, with an amazing view. The area has several restaurants or taverns to choose from and the prices are affordable. Don’t miss to try Santorini fava beans, tomato meatballs, garlic pasta and white eggplants. Santorini’s winemaking tradition is remarkable, so be sure to accompany your food with some traditional wine.

5 p.m.

Wander around the capital of the Island, Fira. It stretches along the rim of the Caldera, offering a magnificent view of Nea and old Kameni. The picturesque alleys of the area, the white churches with the blue dome that coexist harmoniously in the landscape and the traditional houses with domes and arches compose a unique architectural ornament that causes the admiration of every visitor. The area of Fira has numerous businesses that can meet the needs and tastes of the most demanding customer. All you have to do is relax and let the numerous alleyways take you around the beautiful Caldera.

Then, if you walk about 10 minutes following the “eyebrow” of the Caldera you will find yourself first in Firostefani and then in Imerovigli. These are two of the most beautiful natural “balconies” of the island, with the white houses with the special Theraic architecture being built amphitheatrically, many times on the edge of the cliff, and lending a distinct tone to the canvas called Santorini. You can take a tour of Santorini!

8 p.m.

And somewhere around here the thousand-year-old and much-discussed sunset of Santorini is approaching. Words are superfluous in front of the sight of such a spectacle and all that can be said is that the sunset in Santorini offers unique emotions to visitors and completes with an emphatic tone the natural beauty of the Cycladic island.

Head to the northwestern tip of Santorini where the beautiful and famous Oia is located and more specifically to the Castle where you will have the opportunity to enjoy this unique sunset experience. If, in fact, you are one of the lucky ones who have the time, the ability and the money to travel this summer, then the experience will be extremely unique, since in previous years the number of tourists at this particular point is so large that it may be difficult the romantic atmosphere.

What is certain is that with or without crowds the result is still the same. As the sun sets in the Aegean, a pandemonium of colors that the human mind cannot comprehend begins to appear in the sky. Orange, purple, red and yellow make up a colorful palette in the sky that combined with the volcanic scenery turn Santorini into a work of art that has inspired hundreds of artists and non-artists around the world!

9.30 p.m.

To end the day, the options you have are many, since Santorini is a cosmopolitan island with a particularly intense nightlife. First, for your dinner you can choose traditional taverns or gourmet restaurants that cover all tastes and all age ranges. Then, as it begins to get dark, there are many options for your night entertainment from romantic bars with a selected music genre (jazz, blues, ethnic, etc.), to Cocktail Bars with an incredible view of the Caldera, built literally on the edge of the cliff 300 meters above from the surface of the sea, to enjoy your favorite cocktail or drink.

By following these steps you can see Santorini in 24 hours. And don’t forget you can take a Santorini personalized private tour in order to see the beauty of the island in a few hours!

BEST SANTORINI PRIVATE TOURS

Top 10 Restaurants in Santorini

Check the following lists for all day food

Top 10 Restaurants in Santorini for lunch

Top 10 Restaurants in Santorini for dinner

Take a Santorini private tour

Read more about Santorini Tours

Read more articles in our Blog

Santorini Restaurants: The Short Answer

What Do Santorini Restaurants Do Best?

Fava

Tomatokeftedes

White aubergine

Chloro cheese

Capers and caper leaves

Katsouni

Fresh fish

Slow-cooked meat

Assyrtiko and Vinsanto

What to be sceptical about

Where Are the Best Santorini Restaurants by Area?

Pyrgos

Exo Gonia

Megalochori

Emporio

Ammoudi

Vlychada

Fira

Firostefani and Imerovigli

Oia

Kamari

Perissa and Perivolos

Karterados, Messaria and Vothonas

The wineries

What Should You Order in Each Course?

The salad

The dips

The hot mezedes

The greens

The main

The wine

Dessert

Coffee

How Does the Season Change Where You Eat?

April and May

June

July and August

September

October

November to March

Where Do the Ingredients Come From?

What Do Santorini Restaurants Cost?

Street food

Bakery

Village taverna

Beach front

Fish taverna at Ammoudi or Vlychada

Caldera-view restaurant

Fine dining

Wine

What a week costs

When Should You Eat, and Do You Need to Book?

Greek meal times

Booking

Sunset dinners

Cruise passengers

Sunday and holidays

Out of season

How Do You Tell a Good Taverna From a Bad One?

What Mistakes Do People Make With Santorini Restaurants?

What If You Have Dietary Requirements?

Vegetarian

Vegan

Gluten free

Dairy free

Allergies

Children

Are the Caldera-View Restaurants Worth It?

The case for

The case against