Cyclades ferry routes & schedules

Santorini

Arriving at Santorini by ferry is mostly a question of what happens after you land. Every boat uses Athinios, a port cut into the cliff with nothing around it — Fira is 7.5 km up the switchbacks, Oia is 20 km, there is no direct bus to Oia at all, and the island licenses only about thirty taxis. Plan the transfer before you plan the crossing.

Mykonos

Mykonos has two ports and almost every scheduled ferry uses the new one at Tourlos, 2 km north of town. The walk is unpleasant and the taxis are few, but there is a neat solution most guides bury: a €2 passenger boat that runs from the New Port straight into the old harbour in Chora. Knowing that, plus which of Athens's two ports your ticket names, covers most of what goes wrong here.

Naxos

Naxos is the largest of the Cyclades and the most central, which makes it unusual among Greek islands: you can reach it up to seven times a day from Piraeus, and once there, Mykonos is 35 minutes away and Santorini a little over an hour. The ferry decision is not really where to go but which kind of boat — the fast craft that saves two hours, or the conventional ship that still sails when the wind gets up.

Paros

Paros is the junction of the Cyclades. Most ships between Piraeus and the islands call here on the way somewhere else, which makes it the one place in the archipelago where you can change boats rather than backtrack. Naxos is twenty-five minutes away with thirteen sailings a day. That is not a ferry route; that is a bridge.

Milos

Nearly every ferry to Milos ties up at one place: Adamas (Adamantas), the island's harbour on its huge natural bay. From Athens you sail from Piraeus — a SeaJets high-speed catamaran does it in roughly 2h35m, while slower conventional ferries take about 5–7 hours but shrug off the wind. Milos also links into the Western Cyclades chain (Sifnos, Serifos, Paros, Naxos), Santorini, and Crete. It is a volcanic island of coloured cliffs, the moonscape of Sarakiniko, and the boat-only cove of Kleftiko.

Amorgos

Amorgos is the last island of the Cyclades before open sea, long and thin and mountainous, and it has two ferry ports at opposite ends of it. The road between them climbs and descends the spine of the island. Booking the wrong one is the standard Amorgos mistake, and it costs a taxi fare and most of an afternoon.

Syros

Syros is the administrative capital of the Cyclades, and it is the one island in the group that has a winter. Ermoupoli is a working neoclassical city with a shipyard, a courthouse and an opera house — not a resort with a town attached. Mykonos is twenty-five minutes away, which is the point: you can see it and then come back to somewhere real.