Santorini

Santorini

Santorini island is a dream that you see it with open eyes. Ιts name comes from the Frankish crusaders who saw from afar the church of Saint Irene.

Santorini island is a dream that you see it with open eyes. Ιts name comes from the Frankish crusaders who saw from afar the church of Saint Irene. Τhe volcanic activity of Santorini is due to the subduction of the African plate under the Aegean subplate. The magical sunset is an one life experience! The volacano-island with the amazing view is a great destination that you will remember for a long time!

Fira is the capital of Santorini. On the caldera side you get one of the best views of the island and the activity level is enough to keep you entertained for hours. There are cafes, bars, restaurants, all with views and some with several levels of patios and balconies to make the most of the space they have and the fact that when there are several cruise ships sitting below the town is packed with tourists. Just walking down the street is laborious. The cafes fill up with tourists. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Like Leiningen vs the Ants they are unleashed on the town consuming everything in sight, stopping only to take photos of themselves with the view behind them. But the ships come and go and when they go they take the population with them and Fira can actually be a pretty nice place. If you enjoy shopping or eating or drinking or hanging out and watching the view then Fira is worth visiting for a few hours in the day or evening. The port of Fira below is where the cruise ships dock, though they don’t actually dock. They just anchor and the tenders come and get the passengers and take them to the small port where they have two choices. Well three actually. The first choice, and maybe the most sensible one is to take the ski-lift up the mountain. I think they call it a cable-car but you and I would call it a ski-lift. The second choice is to go up by donkey, which is what a lot of people end up having to do because they promised their kids that they would do this to get them excited about coming to Santorini. The third choice is to walk which is done only by people who are in terrific shape and like a challenge or have something to prove. My suggestion is to take the lift. If you are overweight don’t take the donkey (mules actually). Someone will take your photo and put it on the internet and you will be famous in the worst possible way. If you promised the kids they could ride on the donkeys then OK. I get it. And carrying a child is no big deal for a donkey and even less for a mule. But if you weigh more than 150 lbs you should walk alongside if you don’t want to leave your child with a mule-driver while you take the ski-lift, something I am guessing few parents would do.

Most of the restaurants in Fira are tourist restaurants. Well probably all of the restaurants are tourist restaurants but some the tourists don’t know about because they are hidden away on back streets and have only a local clientele. But these would be tourists restaurants too if they could figure out a way of getting tourists into them. But the vast majority of tourists, particularly the ones from the cruise ships, do not eat in restaurants anyway. They eat souvlakia and there are plenty of souvlaki shops around the main square and the other streets that are not on the caldera. Restaurants with caldera view are going to be expensive and though I would not say they are bad, they don’t have to be good since most people will eat there once and never come back again whether the food was good or bad because next summer they will be in Brighton, or Atlantic City or even Alaska. So they serve what they believe the tourists will want and make a whole lot of money in the summer and then close in October and go on holiday cruises themselves. The best restaurants on the island are those that are open year round for the obvious reason that if they are not any good the local people will not eat there and they will cease to exist.

The beach towns of Perissa and Kamari are almost identical, though they are separated by a huge mountain of rock, and attract to their black sand beaches thousands of suntanned boys and girls with perfect bodies. I remember hearing of these marvels of nature (the sand, not the tanned bodies). Black sand to me was like white whales or purple mountains majesty. Something that was considered beyond special and had to be seen to be believed. What the tourist guides don’t tell you about black sand which would be fairly obvious if I had thought about it is that it’s hot as hell. On a summer’s day you cannot walk from your towel to the sea without your flip-flops. You can look down the beach and see the heat rising in waves off the black sand and the shore is lined with flip-flops, waiting like patient dogs whose masters have gone for a swim. In the most popular areas, the places that are lined with beach beds and umbrellas where loud Euro-disco-pop blares out of beach-cafe speakers they have put down wooden sidewalks that can get you from the road to the sea and even a row or two parallel to the sea so you can reach your umbrella. But if you want to be away from the crowds you will most likely need your flip-flops to make it to the sand without feeling like one of Tony Robbins’ unsuccessful firewalkers.

Perissa and Kamari are full of restaurants, bars, cafes and shops. There are supermarkets, campsites and even some kind of water park or mini-golf for kids in Perissa (I am not the kind of travel writer that investigates these things in great detail). Both Kamari and Perissa have diving centers where even if you are a beginner you can get lessons and do an actual dive and maybe find an ancient vase placed there for you to see, or an old fishing boat that was sunk when the EU paid the Greek fishermen to destroy their boats and do something else for a living. On the way to these beaches you pass through towns like Megalochori and Emborio which are agricultural communities that held out til the last minute before only slightly giving in to tourism, where you can still find restaurants that are filled with mostly Greeks.

You will find that staying in a hotel in Perissa or Kamari will enable you to do two things. The first is to swim regularly, and in the sea, not in a pool, though many of the hotels will have pools. The second thing is save a lot of money which will enable you to spend more money on food in areas that restaurants are actually cheaper than in the main villages on the caldera. If you have a car it is no big deal to get in it and drive to Fira or Firostefani or even as far as Oia for dinner or to have a drink and watch the sunset. I would suggest that if you are on a budget then you should consider looking into hotels in Kamari and hotels in Perissa. There are a couple other beach towns but in my opinion these may appeal to people from places where they don’t have internet and you don’t have any idea what it is like until you get there and by then you probably don’t have enough money to go somewhere else. I don’t mean Perivolos which you can think of as just an extension of Perissa. In Perissa Beach recommended hotels include the Aeolis Residence Holiday House, a beautiful 5-bedroom home with a swimming pool larger than most of the hotel swimming pools on the island. It is a few steps away from the beach, shops, restaurants, cafes and bars and the owner is known for being helpful and hospitable and has great reviews. Smaragdi Hotel in Perivolas, basically the same beach, is where we stayed. It’s a family run small hotel with a nice pool, right off the beach. In Kamari Beach the Boathouse Hotel, is a family run, waterfront hotel about a 5-minute walk from the center of Kamari.

If the idea of staying in Red Beach or White Beach or any other color beach forget about it. There is nowhere to stay and if there were you probably would not want to stay there. But they are certainly beautiful places to go and swim. Monolithos and Exogialos face the north (northeast actually) and when the wind blows from the north you can be walking down the street and run over by a wind-surfer or impaled by a beach umbrella. Of course for that reason you can get a lot of hotel for almost nothing in Katerados though you may find yourself isolated and feel like some kind of misfit. Still if saving money is of utmost importance then you probably don’t care. The same goes for Hotels in Monolithos and if nothing else it is close to the airport.

The beach at Vlichada is also pretty spectacular and there are several good fish tavernas within easy walking distance and a restored old tomato factory on the beach that just looks amazing. The benefits to staying here are the fact that it is relatively untouristy, yet on the sea, with most of the buildings being summer homes. The restaurants are inexpensive and good, the beach is rarely crowded and if you keep walking you don’t even need your bathing suit. You will need a rental car though if you want to see the rest of the island or have a night or two in one of the caldera towns and it is only a fifteen minute drive to Fira.

Where to head next?

Keep exploring the best of Greece! After Santorini, the top destinations to visit are Mykonos, Heraklion, and Naxos.

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Photography Sessions

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Parasailing

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Horse riding at Thirassia

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Horse riding

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Glass Bottom Cruise

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