Greek Island Travel Adventure: Santorini

Santorini is a unique island with architecture and island landscape that makes it not only unique to other Greek islands, but to other islands all over the world. Approaching Santorini, you see white across the top of the island, and as you get closer, you realize it's the different towns in Santorini.

We spent 5 days in Santorini, and loved this romantic island. To plan our time in Santorini, we once again used Georgia from Vamos Travels to create our itinerary. For our itinerary, we had a range of activities from hikes, to taking a cruise around the island. Once again, Georgia planned a wonderful itinerary to make our time in Santorini amazing!

Top 3 Favorite Things to Visit on Santorini:

1. Hike from Fira to Oia

One of the most BEAUTIFUL hikes I've ever been on! We started in Fira, and walked along the Santorini coast to Oia in under 3 hours. Before taking the trip, we were told this 6 mile hike could take 2-5 hours, and we packed two backpacks, my camera, sunblock, hats and plenty of water to get us through this hike. While walking along the breezy path in the islands heat, we enjoyed Santorini’s dramatic cliff views to make this hike one of the most memorable activities to date of our entire Greek Islands trip.

2. Sail around the island of Santorini

We chose to do a half day sailing yacht tour with Sunset Oia. We did ours during the day (not the sunset cruise), because we wanted more sailing and time to swim in the water, and we're OK with not watching the Santorini sunset from the ocean.

Our tour consisted of swimming in hot springs (from the new volcano), seeing Aspronisi (an ancient lighthouse), sailing past the White beach and swimming off the boat at the Red beach. Also, since the tour was over lunch, the crew grilled us a traditional greek lunch.

We picked a tour with less people than the other tours offered. When booking, make sure to pay attention to the number of people on the tour. When there's too many people, its overwhelming and you feel the boat is overcrowded. With our smaller tour, there was 4-5 couples on board, and we ended up all talking and getting to know each other!

3. Exploring Oia during the day and night

The town of Oia was incredible to walk through. We loved exploring up and down all the little streets and seeing the dramatic views looking out at the town and at the ocean below.

When we visited Oia, we would make an effort to go a few hours before sunset to get better parking and walk around before the crowds would come to watch the Santorini sunsets from Oia.

4. Visit Santorini's beaches

While in Crete, we were able to see pink sand, and when we heard there was a black and a red beach on Santorini, we knew we had to visit and say we have seen all different colors of beaches.

Overall, Santorini was a beautiful island that had so much to offer. If you're ever able to visit, I definitely recommend my 4 favorite activities on the island. Next up on our Greek travels, Rhodes!