Boat Tours & Day Cruises from Santorini

Thirteen well-reviewed boats leave Santorini on a normal summer day, and the spread is wider than at any other Aegean port: $35 buys the volcano, the hot springs and Thirassia from the Old Port below Fira, $169 buys a sunset catamaran with dinner and a hotel transfer. One is a shuttle with a crater at the end of it; the other is five hours of swimming and eating.

They leave from different places, too. Volcano boats go from the Old Port (Gialos), which has no road: you arrive by cable car, on foot down 588 steps, or on a mule. Catamarans go from Vlychada marina on the south coast, ten kilometres away — which is why almost every catamaran listing includes a minibus. Ammoudi, below Oia, sends the Thirassia caique. The wrong harbour is a taxi across the island, not a five-minute problem.

Two charges land after you have paid for the boat: €5 in cash to the rangers to set foot on Nea Kameni, almost never in the ticket, and — off a cruise ship — Greece's own €20 high-season levy for stepping ashore here. The full list is below, with the arithmetic on doing the caldera unguided.

The Old Port of Fira — Gialos, or Skala — is the pier directly under the town, and it has no road. Cruise tenders land here and the volcano boats load here. You get up and down by cable car, by 588 stone steps zigzagging 220 vertical metres, or on a mule using the same steps. The cable car, a gift of the Loula and Evangelos Nomikos Foundation, runs six linked cabins of six and moves up to 1,200 passengers an hour in a three-minute ride. An adult single is €10, a child of six to twelve €5, luggage €5 a piece, and there is no return ticket. June to August it runs 06:30 to 23:00, in May, September and October to 22:00. With two ships in, the bottom-station queue reaches three quarters of an hour, and the queue coming back down is usually worse.

Vlychada marina sits on the south coast, outside the caldera altogether, ten kilometres and twenty-five minutes from Fira. Nearly every catamaran leaves from it, and nearly every catamaran listing therefore includes a minibus: the KTEL network makes you change in Fira, and the Vlychada leg is €2.70 on top of what you already paid. Ammoudi, Oia's old fishing port at the foot of the red cliff, is reached by road or by 278 steps down from the castle; the Thirassia caique goes from here, and it is the least useful harbour on the island for a scheduled group tour. Athinios is the working ferry port, six kilometres south of Fira, where a few larger tour boats load and the bus runs to ferry times.

Say you are ashore for a day and want the caldera, Oia and the sunset, unguided. From the tender pier the cable car is €10 up. The KTEL bus Fira to Oia is €2.20 and takes about half an hour; back again is another €2.20, and the cable car down another €10. That is €24.40 a head before a coffee, and it buys two bus rides and two queues. The cheapest guided day here, the volcano and hot-springs circuit, is $35 each and includes a crater no bus reaches.

The one genuinely cheap piece of water is the Thirassia caique from Ammoudi: ten minutes to Riva and Korfos for a couple of euro, cash to the boatman, several sailings a day in season. It is a public link for the fifty-odd people who live over there, and the Santorini Port Authority confirms the times day by day because weather moves them. What it does not do is Nea Kameni, the springs, or the caldera's western wall — not a cheaper version of the tour, a different island. Renting a licence-free boat at Vlychada undercuts a catamaran seat only from about four people up, and the rental firms will tell you themselves it is a south-coast toy: the caldera's west wall drops to more than 300 metres of water, with no sheltered anchorages and the meltemi funnelling down it every afternoon.

Rain is not the problem here. The meltemi is — the dry north wind that establishes over the Aegean around the middle of July, blows into late August, and builds through the day to peak in the afternoon. Catamarans and small sailing boats are cancelled first when it rises past about force 5; the heavy motor cruisers out of the Old Port keep running in conditions that stop them. Hence May, June and September for a sailing day, and mornings over afternoons in any month.

The calendar also moves the sunset against your own clock. In late June the sun goes down around 20:40 and a five-hour sunset cruise leaves mid-afternoon; by mid-October it is 18:40 and the same boat leaves before lunch. On a ship with an all-aboard before dark, that cruise does not fit in June and does fit in October.