Santorini Greece Map: Three Arrival Points and Eight Meeting Places

Santorini is a crescent about 73 square kilometres in area wrapped round a flooded crater. Where you land on it decides your first hour and what you pay to get out of the port, and the three arrival points are nowhere near each other.

The shape of the island

Picture a backwards C. The inside edge is the caldera wall, a cliff about 300 metres high with the villages balanced on top of it: Oia at the northern tip, then Imerovigli, Firostefani and Fira, then the rim drops south towards Akrotiri. The outside edge slopes gently the other way into farmland and the long black beaches.

Almost everything a visitor comes for is on the inside edge, and almost everything practical is on the outside: the airport, the ferry port, the beach resorts and the vineyards.

Athinios, where the ferries dock

Athinios sits on the caldera shore about halfway down the west side. It is a working road port at the bottom of a switchback climb, with buses meeting the boats and a taxi rank that empties fast. From here to Fira is roughly fifteen minutes uphill.

The Old Port, where cruise tenders land

This is the one that catches people. Cruise ships anchor in the caldera and tender passengers to the Old Port directly below Fira. There is no road up. Fira sits 220 metres above it, and the three ways to close that gap are the cable car, a footpath of about 590 steps, and a mule.

The cable car costs EUR 10 one way and is rated at 1,200 people an hour against ships that can land thousands. That arithmetic is why Santorini Greece shore excursions exist in the shape they do here, and why two of them run you round it by sea.

Monolithos, where the flights land

The airport is on the flat eastern side, roughly fifteen minutes from Fira by road and about the same from the beach resorts at Kamari. It handles international flights through the summer. Arriving here is the easy option: you land on the level and drive to wherever you are staying.

One thing worth knowing about the runway: it is short, it sits close to the sea, and the same northerly that reroutes the boats crosses it. Delays are more common here in July and August than a timetable suggests, which is a good argument for not booking your tour on the morning you land.

Getting between the villages

Buses radiate from Fira and almost nothing runs village to village, so a trip from Oia to Perissa means going in and out again. Taxis are few and vanish before sunset. A hire car solves the movement and creates a parking problem in Oia and Fira that is genuinely difficult in August.

The caldera footpath is the exception and the pleasure: Fira to Oia in about three hours along the rim, free, with no traffic on it at all.

Distances here are short and slow. Nothing is more than about eighteen kilometres from anything else, and every journey still takes longer than you expect, because the roads wind, the village centres are pedestrian, and the traffic through Fira backs up in August. Budget your day by the half hour rather than by the kilometre.

Where the tours in this list actually meet

Two of those need your own transport to reach: the farm above Megalochori and the stables at Vlychada. The winery at Exo Gonia is the third. Everything else either collects you or meets you where you were already standing.

Which arrival point each meeting place assumes

The map

What is at each of these places is on the highlights page, and the trips that link them are on the Santorini Greece Tours home page.