About Santorini Island

Santorini is the largest island of a small circular archipelago in the southern Aegean, about 200 kilometres southeast of the Greek mainland. Its official name is Thira, and its ancient one was Thera. The whole island group is what is left of a volcano whose centre collapsed into the sea, and almost everything on Santorini, from the shape of the coast to the colour of the beaches and the taste of the wine, follows from that.

Geography

The caldera at the centre is a flooded basin roughly 12 by 7 kilometres, up to 385 metres deep, with cliffs standing some 300 metres above the water on the western side. It took its present form in the Minoan eruption of Thera about 3,600 years ago, which also laid down the deep ash and pumice beds that give the island its layered, multicoloured cliff faces. The collapse left Santorini with its crescent shape: sheer on the caldera side, sloping gently down to the sea on the east.

Like the rest of the Cyclades, the island gets the meltemi, the dry northerly wind that blows hardest through July and August. That is one reason late spring and September are usually named as the best time to charter a gulet in Greece, and the same weeks are the more comfortable ones for walking the caldera rim.

Akrotiri and the Bronze Age

Akrotiri, in the south of the island, is the reason Santorini matters to archaeology. It is often called the Pompeii of the Aegean, though with one important difference: no uninterred human remains have been found there, which points to an orderly evacuation before the eruption.

The site was first settled as a small fishing and farming village as early as the fifth millennium BC. By the end of the third millennium BC it had grown into a proper town with paved streets, a drainage system and specialised workshops. It was a Cycladic settlement rather than a Cretan one, but it is closely associated with Minoan civilisation through its Linear A inscriptions and its pottery and wall paintings, which follow Cretan models. It was destroyed by the Theran eruption in the sixteenth century BC, with radiocarbon dating placing the event most probably between 1620 and 1530 BC.

The ash that destroyed the town also preserved it. Excavation, begun in 1967 under Spyridon Marinatos and continued by Christos Doumas from 1975, has uncovered buildings standing three storeys high, wall paintings such as the Blue Monkeys and the Spring Fresco with their colours largely intact, and rows of pithoi, the large ceramic storage jars that indicate a settlement trading well beyond its own shores.

The Rim Villages

Fira, the capital, sits directly above the caldera wall and holds most of the island's shops, restaurants and late-opening bars, along with the Museum of Prehistoric Thera. Oia occupies the northwestern tip and draws the largest crowd at sunset. Imerovigli, between the two, is the highest of the rim villages and the quietest of the three.

Many houses in these villages, particularly in Oia, are cut back into the cliff rather than built out from it. The surrounding pumice holds a steady temperature, so these yposkafa rooms stay cool in summer and hold warmth in winter without any mechanical help.

Beaches

The volcanic geology shows most plainly along the shore, where the sand and rock change colour from bay to bay:

• Kokkini Paralia, the Red Beach, below a cliff of oxidised red-brown volcanic rock in the south of the island.
• Aspri Paralia, the White Beach, a small cove of pale pumice cliffs and pebbles nearby, reachable only by boat.
• Perissa and Perivolos, a long stretch of black volcanic sand on the southeast coast below the Mesa Vouno ridge.

Food and Wine

Rainfall on Santorini is low and the soil is volcanic, which stresses the plants and concentrates what they produce. Three crops are specific to the island: small cherry tomatoes, usually sun-dried or made into paste; white aubergines, sweeter and less bitter than the purple kind; and fava, which here is made not from broad beans but from a local pulse, Lathyrus clymenum. The main white wine grape is Assyrtiko, grown in vines trained into low woven baskets that shield the fruit from the wind.

Later History

After the Bronze Age the island was resettled by Dorian Greeks, who founded Ancient Thira high on the Mesa Vouno ridge, and it passed in turn to Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine control. Venetian rule began in 1207 under the Duchy of Naxos and left the island its Catholic community and its five kastelia. The Ottomans took Santorini in the sixteenth century and held it, apart from a brief period of Russian control in the early 1770s during the Russo-Turkish war, until the Greek War of Independence, after which the island became part of the modern Greek state.

The Volcano Today

Nea Kameni, the uninhabited islet at the centre of the caldera, carries the active craters. A marked path leads up from the landing stage past steam vents and sulphur deposits. Warm, iron-rich springs seep into a shallow bay on the neighbouring Palea Kameni, where boats anchor off and passengers swim in. The last eruption was in 1950; ground deformation was recorded around the caldera in 2011 and 2012, and the area went through a period of intense seismic activity between mid-2024 and early 2025.