Antiparos Island

Antiparos lies in the Cyclades, separated from its larger neighbour Paros by a channel less than two kilometres wide. The municipality covers 45.2 square kilometres and counted 1,265 residents in the 2021 census, spread along an island roughly 11 kilometres long and no more than 4.5 kilometres across, rising to 308 metres at the central peak of Agios Ilias. In antiquity it was known as Oliaros, a name possibly of Phoenician origin meaning "wooded mountain," recorded by writers such as Pliny, Strabo and Virgil.

From Oliaros to the Venetian Kastro

Venetian rule arrived in 1207, when the nobleman Marco Sanudo seized the island, and by 1440 another Venetian, Giovanni Loredan, had built the castle that still anchors the old town and brought settlers to live around it at his own expense. The design was defensive and communal rather than lordly: 24 two-storey houses were arranged in a closed square whose blank outward walls formed the curtain of the fortification, with a tower raised on a mound at the centre and an aqueduct and chapels inside the ring. Ottoman control followed from 1537, and during the Orlov Revolt of 1770 to 1774 a Russian fleet held the island. Antiparos passed to the Greek state in 1832, a decade after the outbreak of the war of independence. Much of the kastro survives, absorbed into the whitewashed houses of the chora, and the narrow entrance passage beside the church of Agios Nikolaos is still the way in.

Inside the Cave of Antiparos

The island's best-known natural feature, the Cave of Antiparos, is a deep chamber of stalactites and stalagmites on Agios Ioannis hill that has drawn visitors for centuries. The entrance stands about 171 metres above the sea behind a portal roughly 20 metres wide, and the visitor route descends some 200 metres on 411 steps into a hall reaching around 85 metres below the surface, where the air holds steady near 15°C. The Parian poet Archilochus, writing in the seventh century BC, is traditionally counted as its first recorded visitor. Inscriptions cut into the great stalagmite near the entrance name Macedonian officers who are said to have sheltered here in the fourth century BC after conspiring against Alexander the Great.

The cave's strangest episode came at Christmas 1673, when the Marquis de Nointel, French ambassador to Constantinople, celebrated midnight mass on a truncated stalagmite used as an altar, accompanied by an entourage reported at some 500 people; the inscription cut beneath it still records the date. Lord Byron and King Otto of Greece both left their names on the walls, and during the Russian occupation ships' crews cut away formations that ended up in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. A chapel dedicated to Saint John the Cave-Dweller, Agios Ioannis Spiliotis, sits at the mouth of the cave; electric light was installed in 1995, and the staircase and LED lighting were renewed in 2009. Admission income still forms a notable share of the municipal budget.

Despotiko and the Sanctuary of Apollo

The nearby islet of Despotiko has yielded significant excavations of Cycladic cemeteries and a classical-era temple. Systematic work there has run since 2001 under the archaeologist Yannos Kourayos of the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades, uncovering an archaic sanctuary of Apollo with more than twenty buildings, two large complexes and a long series of finds: fragments of marble kouroi, painted sixth-century BC pottery, metal votives and storage jars with relief decoration. In the scale of its architecture and the richness of its dedications the site is now compared to Delos itself, a remarkable claim for an uninhabited islet reachable only by small boat from the Antiparos port of Agios Georgios.

Beaches, Anchorages and the Channel

With sheltered water close to Paros and easy access to Despotiko's ruins, many charter guests exploring Greece anchor here for the afternoon, splitting time between the old Venetian kastro and the quieter beaches along the southern coast. Soros, Glyfa and Apantima face south and east, away from the prevailing summer wind; Psaraliki lies within walking distance of the chora; and the long strand beside the campsite on the north-eastern shore is the island's traditional naturist beach. The channel itself is the reason the anchorages work, since the strait between the two islands is largely screened from the meltemi that sweeps the open Cyclades in high summer.

Getting There and When to Go

Two crossings serve the island. A small open-deck car ferry shuttles the 1.5-kilometre channel from Pounta on the south-western coast of Paros to Agios Georgios in about seven minutes, running roughly every half hour from early morning until after midnight in July and August, while a passenger boat from Parikia takes around 30 minutes and lands directly at the chora. The Pounta route is by far the more dependable of the two on windy days. The cave and most tavernas operate from spring through October, and late May, June and September deliver warm sea, long daylight and a fraction of the August crowds. The island is small enough that a bicycle, a scooter or a decent pair of walking shoes covers almost all of it.