Santorini Without the Crowds: A Local Blueprint

The key to Santorini is to treat the famous parts of it as you would any natural wonder: approach them at the correct time, with the correct attitude, and not via organised group transport. The caldera view from Oia is, genuinely, one of the great views in the world. The problem is that 4,000 other people have also been told this, and they have all arrived at 7pm on a Tuesday in August with identical telephoto lenses.

Go in April or October. The light is better — the low-angle sun of shoulder season turns the caldera walls a colour that high summer, with its flat overhead light, cannot replicate. The wind is more present, which means the bougainvillea is doing something interesting at all times. And the village of Oia, which in August is essentially a crowd of tourists taking photographs of other tourists, becomes navigable.

The non-famous parts of Santorini are extraordinary. The village of Pyrgos, at the centre of the island, is older and higher and quieter than anything on the caldera rim. Its kastro — a concentric system of lanes and archways built for defence — can be walked in twenty minutes, after which you sit in the square and eat the local white eggplant and drink a glass of Assyrtiko and understand what the island actually is when it is not performing for cameras.

The beaches of the south — Perivolos, Agios Georgios — are long and black and backed by beach bars that, in the right season, play the correct music at the correct volume. The red beach near Akrotiri, which is genuinely red, the colour of oxidised iron, is photogenic beyond reason. Visit it in the morning, before the boats from Fira arrive.

Akrotiri itself: the Minoan city preserved under volcanic ash for 3,600 years, excavated since the 1960s, is the most compelling archaeological site in the Cyclades. It is built over with a modern protective structure that controls light and temperature; you walk through the preserved streets of a Bronze Age city and the effect is not didactic but visceral. People lived here, ate here, loved here. Then one morning, without warning, the mountain decided otherwise.