About Mykonos Island

Mykonos covers 85.5 square kilometres of granite and low hills in the central Cyclades, ringed by Tinos, Syros, Paros and Naxos. Around 10,700 people live there year round, most of them in Chora on the west coast, which is both the port and the commercial centre of the island. The highest ground reaches 341 metres. Greeks call it the Island of the Winds, and the name is literal: the meltemi blows across it for weeks at a time in summer and has worn the rock down to the bare, rounded shapes that define the interior.

Geography and Getting Around

The south coast holds most of the sand. It sits in the lee of the north wind, and low headlands break the shoreline into a series of separate bays, each with its own beach and its own access road. The north coast takes the meltemi head-on and is rockier and emptier as a result. Several of the quieter bays, Fokos and Agios Sostis among them, are reached only by unsurfaced track or from the water, which is why so many visitors explore Mykonos by private gulet charter. Ferries and high-speed craft run to the new port from Athens and the neighbouring islands, and the airport lies about 4 km southeast of Chora.

From the Carians to the Ottomans

The Carians were the island's first known inhabitants, followed by Ionians from Athens in the early 11th century BC. Mykonos itself was poor in land and water; its importance came from what lay about 2 km across the water to the southwest. Delos was the sanctuary island of Apollo and the treasury of the Delian League, and Mykonos served as its supply base and transit point, a role it kept in one form or another for centuries.

After the fall of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the island passed to the Venetian Ghisi family, and Venice took direct control in 1390. The fleet of Hayreddin Barbarossa attacked in 1537, and Ottoman rule followed and lasted until 1830, administered at arm's length through locally appointed syndics.

Mykonos took an active part in the revolution of 1821 under Manto Mavrogenous, an educated aristocrat who spent her family fortune on the independence campaign; her statue stands in the square in Chora that carries her name. The decades that followed were hard. The opening of the Corinth Canal at the end of the 19th century pulled shipping away from the island, the First World War deepened the slump, and many Mykonians emigrated to mainland Greece and to America. Tourism reversed the decline, and by the 1960s it had become the island's dominant industry.

The Beaches

Paradise and Super Paradise, on the south coast, are the party beaches, with bars and sound systems running from the early afternoon. Platys Gialos, Psarou and Ornos are organised and sheltered, backed by hotels and restaurants and served by regular buses and sea taxis. Elia is the longest stretch of sand on the island. Kalafatis, further east, is the windsurfing beach, precisely because it catches the wind that the others are hiding from. Agios Sostis and Fokos on the north coast have no sunbeds and no beach bar, and Lia, at the southeastern end, stays quieter than its neighbours mainly because the drive out is long.

Chora

The capital is a dense grid of whitewashed pedestrian lanes, deliberately narrow and irregular, which keeps the wind out of the streets and the sun off the walls. Matogianni is the main shopping street, lined with boutiques and bars. Little Venice, on the western waterfront, is a row of houses built out over the water by merchants and sea captains from the middle of the 18th century onwards, their wooden balconies hanging directly over the waves; the name refers to that overhang, not to any Venetian building work. Above it stand the Kato Mili windmills, and the church of Panagia Paraportiani, begun in the 15th century and not finished until the 17th, sits at the harbour end of the quarter.

Nightlife

Chora's bars fill after sunset and the beach clubs take over later. Cavo Paradiso, on the cliff above Paradise beach, runs into the morning and books international DJs through the season; Paradise Club, on the beach below, works to a similar schedule. The town also keeps a good number of ordinary tavernas and quiet waterfront bars, which is where most of the island's own residents end up.

Museums and Days Out

The Archaeological Museum was built in 1905 to house the contents of the Purification Pit excavated on Rheneia in 1898, the mass grave into which the Athenians moved every burial cleared from Delos. Its collection runs to Cycladic pottery of the 9th and 8th centuries BC and includes a large vase made on Tinos showing scenes from the fall of Troy. The Aegean Maritime Museum, founded in 1983 and open since 1985, covers the history of Greek merchant shipping. Delos itself is the obvious day trip, half an hour by boat from the old port, and the islet of Dragonisi off the eastern tip of Mykonos is known for the sea caves along its shoreline.