Mykonos: What It Actually Is (and What to Do About It)

Mykonos is the most commercially successful Greek island and, depending on your perspective and your bank balance, either a perfectly engineered pleasure machine or a cautionary tale about what happens when a beautiful place discovers what it is worth per square metre. Both things are simultaneously true. The island is genuinely beautiful — the Cycladic architecture of the Chora, with its perfect white cubes and proliferating blue doors, is as good as anywhere — and it has been thoroughly monetised in a way that has replaced most of its local character with an international luxury vernacular.

The correct way to do Mykonos: go for two nights, not a week. Stay in the Chora, in a small hotel in the labyrinthine back streets rather than on the coast. Eat at Nikos Taverna, which has been operating in the same spot since 1957 and serves the same food with the same lack of ceremony. Explore Little Venice in the early morning, before the sunset crowds arrive, when the buildings overhang the water in a silence that belongs entirely to them.

The beaches: Super Paradise, Paradise, Elia. They are what they are — loud, expensive, beautiful, full of people who have paid considerable sums to be seen being relaxed. If you go, go early, rent a sunbed, order a beer at 11am without guilt, and understand that you are participating in a specific international ritual that Mykonos has been perfecting since the 1970s.

What Mykonos does extremely well: it is the best organised island in the Cyclades. The water is clear, the ferries run on time, the nightlife operates at a genuinely international level if that is what you want, and the infrastructure that comes with extreme wealth — excellent restaurants, well-maintained streets, reliable service — is visible everywhere. It has simply decided to be this thing, and it is very good at it.