Tours in Santorini

Santorini is the rim of a volcano that blew itself apart around 1600 BC in one of the largest eruptions in human history, and everything about the island follows from that. What is left is a crescent of cliff standing three hundred metres above a flooded caldera, with the villages strung along the top edge — Fira, the capital, Firostefani and Imerovigli along the rim walk, and Oia at the northern tip where the sunset crowd gathers. Inside the bay, the black cones of Nea Kameni and Palea Kameni are still active and still steaming. The outer slope falls away east to the black and red beaches at Kamari, Perissa and Akrotiri, and to the vineyards, where vines are trained into low baskets on the ground because of the wind. Akrotiri itself is the Bronze Age town buried by the eruption and dug out with its streets and three-storey houses intact.

The caldera is what is sold. Boat trips cross to the volcano and the hot springs, and the sunset cruises with dinner aboard are the island's signature; the same water is covered by catamaran, by traditional wooden boat and by private charter. On land the rim walk from Fira to Oia takes three hours and is the best free thing here. Wine tastings run at the estates inland, where Assyrtiko grown in volcanic ash produces something that tastes like nowhere else, and Akrotiri and the Museum of Prehistoric Thera in Fira are the archaeology. Helicopter transfers and photo shoots have become a category of their own.

Practical. The season is April to October and the island is genuinely overloaded in July and August, particularly on cruise days when several thousand people arrive at once — check the cruise schedule if you can, because it changes Oia completely. Sunset in Oia means arriving ninety minutes early or watching from Imerovigli instead. The old port below Fira is reached by cable car, by donkey or by 588 steps, and the queue for the cable car after a boat trip is long. There are almost no sand beaches and no shade on the rim. Water is expensive and shipped in. Book the caldera boats and the good restaurants days ahead in season.