The accusation is everywhere. TikTok is full of it. Travel forums are full of it. "Santorini is overrated." "Just an Instagram trap." "You are paying €400 a night to stand in a crowd and wait an hour for someone to move out of your shot." "The beaches are pebbles. The streets are a shuffling tourist queue."
I understand every single one of these complaints. I have made some of them myself. I was there — I navigated the buses, I did the maths on the accommodation, I stood in the Oia crowd at sunset and understood, immediately, why people feel cheated.
And my honest answer is still no. Santorini is not overrated. But the reason it is not overrated requires honesty about what it actually is — and why so many people experience it as a disappointment. The problem is not Santorini. The problem is a specific, influential, widely-shared lie about what Santorini is.
My girlfriend and I arrived in Santorini late at night, under an almost moonless sky. We couldn't really see anything of the island and simply took a cab from the airport to our Airbnb. I woke up first and stepped outside. The sea around you in the distance in every direction you look. The warm salty air permeating everywhere. A donkey on someone's land right next to the Airbnb. I couldn't believe it.
The Airbnb was small. Far from the nearest big town. But it was still Santorini — and Santorini is nothing if not beautiful.
The Santorini that exists on Instagram does not exist for most visitors. The gap between that version and reality is where the disappointment lives. But the actual island — the caldera, the hike, the wine, the Minoan city buried in ash — is as extraordinary as the photographs suggest. Here is the honest picture of both.
The Case For Overrated — Addressed Honestly
Let me give the argument its full credit first, because it deserves it.
The Instagram version of Santorini is a lie. Not an exaggeration — a lie. The Santorini that exists on social media is the 1% version. A private infinity pool overlooking the caldera at sunrise, no other guests visible, a perfectly styled breakfast, the Aegean below, nobody within a kilometre. This experience exists. But it starts at €800 to €1,500 a night and is available to a tiny fraction of the people who actually visit the island. The other 99% of visitors — the ones in Airbnbs 15 minutes from Fira, the ones taking the bus, the ones who could only book three days because a week on this island costs a month's rent — do not get this experience. When their reality does not match the version they were sold, they call the island overrated. This is understandable. It is also not the island's fault.
The crowds are a genuine problem. On July 23rd, 2024, 11,000 cruise ship passengers arrived in Santorini in a single day. The island has a permanent population of around 20,000 people. The municipality issued a warning for residents to remain indoors. This is not a sustainable situation — and it is not an enjoyable one for the visitors who arrived on those ships expecting to wander charming streets in peace.
The accommodation cost is real. You cannot fully experience Santorini's defining quality — the caldera view — without paying for it. Every property on the island with a proper caldera view starts at a price that makes budget travel feel punishing. You can stay cheaply. But cheaply in Santorini means staying somewhere without the view that defines the island, and then paying to eat and drink somewhere that has it.
The beaches are genuinely not for everyone. Volcanic pebbles and black sand are striking to photograph. They are less comfortable to lie on than the sandy beaches of Mykonos or Crete. And the water near the busiest beaches can be murky from boat traffic in peak season.
If you arrived expecting Mykonos with better views, you were disappointed. If you arrived expecting the Instagram version on a moderate budget, you were disappointed. If you arrived in August expecting tranquility, you were probably quite disappointed. The people who say Santorini is overrated are not wrong about what they experienced. They were just measuring it against a version of the island that was never available to them.
Why Santorini Is Not Overrated
The caldera view is genuinely as extraordinary as it looks. This is the thing that Santorini's critics forget to say, and it matters enormously. There are very few places on earth where the photographs accurately represent the experience of standing there in person. Santorini is one of them.
The houses of Fira and Oia cascading down the cliff face of a collapsed volcanic crater, the caldera spreading out below and beyond — 12 kilometres wide, up to 400 metres deep — the light at sunset turning the water from blue to gold to a deep volcanic red. This is real. It is not an Instagram filter. It is one of the most extraordinary landscapes in Europe, and it delivers every single time.
On that first morning — when I woke up before my girlfriend and stepped outside for the first time and was taken aback at the scent and the scenery — all tiredness of travel immediately lifted from me and I could not wait to explore the island.
I quickly rushed my girlfriend to wake up and get dressed so that we could head out on the 15-minute walk to the city of Oia — the beautiful, signature white-and-blue town. I'll be very honest: we got lucky. We were there early. The cruise ship people had not arrived yet.
Oia was empty.
We stepped onto that popular boardwalk and were absolutely blown away by the caldera. Its beauty is really no exaggeration. It takes your breath away. I couldn't quite believe I was standing there.
You know when you're in a moment and you really want to remember it forever, so you actively tell yourself to take as many mental snapshots as possible because you never want to forget how that moment felt? Yeah. This is one of them.
We found a little restaurant serving breakfast — overlooking the caldera. We were essentially alone. It was all surreal.
The Fira to Oia hike is one of the finest walks in Europe. Nine kilometres along the caldera rim, the sea below you on one side and the island stretching away on the other. Ancient ruins appear as you walk. Windmills. A church. A village you did not know was there. At the end of it: Oia and the most famous sunset in Greece. Three to four hours on foot, and it costs nothing beyond the energy to take it. This alone would justify a visit.
Santorini's Assyrtiko white wine is one of Europe's genuinely great bottles, produced from vines grown in volcanic soil and trained into low circular wreath shapes — kouloura — to protect against the fierce Aegean winds. This method has been in continuous use for more than 3,500 years. The wine it produces is dry, mineral, volcanic, with a salinity that feels like the sea itself. There is nothing else like it in the world. A wine tasting at one of the island's caldera-edge wineries at sunset costs under €30. This is not a tourist novelty. It is a serious wine from a serious tradition, and it is one of the best experiences the island offers.
The secret most visitors miss entirely
Beneath the southern end of the island lies Akrotiri — a Minoan city destroyed and perfectly preserved by the volcanic eruption of approximately 1600 BCE. Archaeologists have called it the Pompeii of the Aegean. Multi-storey buildings. Sophisticated drainage systems. Frescoes of extraordinary quality. The city was so completely preserved it may have inspired Plato's account of Atlantis. Most people who visit Santorini every year never go near it. They spend their days in Oia and Fira and leave without knowing it exists.
This is not Santorini's failure. It is the failure of the Instagram itinerary, which reduces a complex, historically layered island to a single viewpoint and a sunset. The island is offering you far more. Most visitors simply do not collect it.
The Oia sunset — even with the crowds
Yes, it is crowded. Yes, you need to arrive 45 minutes early for a decent position. Yes, there are people selling cocktails at prices that make you briefly question your life choices. But when the sun goes down over the Aegean and the light turns the caldera gold and then pink and then that deep volcanic red — it is one of the genuinely great spectacles of nature. The crowd does not ruin it. The crowd, if anything, is proof that some things are still worth watching together.
"The caldera is as real as it looks in every photograph you have ever seen of it. Not many places can say that."
How to Visit Santorini Without Being Disappointed
This is the real answer to the question. The people who leave Santorini disappointed left with expectations the island was never designed to meet. The people who love it understood what they were actually going to experience before they arrived.
Santorini — The Honest Guide to Getting It Right
Go in May or September. This is not a minor recommendation — it is the most important decision you will make about the trip. The Oia sunset crowds in July are genuinely thousands of people pressed together. In May, the light is extraordinary, the crowds are manageable, and prices are 20–30% lower.
Accept the accommodation reality. The famous cave hotel with a private infinity pool is a fantasy for most budgets. Book what you can actually afford, near Fira, and spend the money you save on eating and drinking extraordinarily well.
Walk from Fira to Oia. 9km, 3–4 hours. Do not take the bus. The walk is the point. The caldera is beside you the entire time. This is the single best thing you can do on the island.
Find Lucky's Souvlakis in Fira. A pork gyro for €4, eaten at the caldera edge with one of the best views on the island. This is the counter to every "Santorini is expensive" argument. I wrote about it in my Athens vs Santorini guide — and I'd go back for it tomorrow.
Visit Akrotiri. Go early in the morning before the tour groups arrive. Two hours there changes how you understand the island.
Watch the sunset from somewhere other than the Oia castle. The same sunset from the caldera edge in Imerovigli, or from a boat on a sunset cruise, is equally extraordinary and far less crowded.
For travellers who’d like to extend their relationship with the place — and with the people who write about it — the PONTUS community runs a private travel membership. Read about the community side →
What Santorini Is — And What It Is Not
Santorini is a landscape. It is not a beach destination, a city break, a hiking holiday, an adventure destination, or a nightlife island. It is a volcanic landscape of geological significance that happens to have towns, food, wine, and hotels arranged along its caldera edge. The towns and the food and the wine are excellent. But the landscape is the thing.
If you go for the landscape — if you go to see the caldera, to walk along its rim, to watch the light change on the water below, to drink wine made from 3,500-year-old vines in volcanic soil — Santorini will not disappoint you. It cannot disappoint you. Because the landscape is real, it is there, and it is available to anyone who looks at it.
If you go for the Instagram version, you will be disappointed. But that is not the island being overrated. That is you confusing a place with a photograph of itself.
Despite its downsides, I would no doubt return to Santorini in the future. I would return to Lucky's Souvlakis in the town of Fira and eat the best gyros in the world while overlooking the stunning caldera. I would make the Oia–Fira hike again. I would not revisit the red-sand beach. I would go deeper on the archaeology. It was an incredible experience — and one that I wish you will have as well. And if the question for you is not "is Santorini overrated" but "which Greek island should I actually choose," the honest side-by-side with Mykonos is its own piece.
The Verdict — And Why It Matters
Is Santorini overrated? Only if you measure it against a version of itself that was never real to begin with. Measure it against what it actually is — a volcanic caldera of extraordinary beauty, a 3,500-year-old winemaking tradition, a Minoan city buried in ash, a hike that will stay with you for decades, and a sunset that earns every photograph ever taken of it — and the answer is no. Emphatically no.
Go in the right season. Walk the caldera path. Drink the Assyrtiko. Find the cheap gyro. Skip the Instagram spots at noon. Visit Akrotiri. Watch the sunset from somewhere that is not the famous viewpoint. You will come home and wonder why anyone ever said Santorini was overrated. And you will also understand why they said it — because the version they were sold was never for sale.
"Santorini is not overrated. The Instagram version of Santorini is a lie. These are two completely different statements, and confusing them is how expectations get destroyed."
Everyone should get to experience this.
This is why I started PONTUS. Everyone deserves to see the Santorini that is actually there — not the version Instagram sold them, but the real one. We are a community of people who believe travel should be a way of life, not a luxury. And that doing it right makes all the difference.
- For those who want to be part of a community of like-minded people
- For those who don't want to break the bank just because they want to see the world
- For those who are ready to put the effort in and build their own income from the travel industry
Whatever you want, whatever you choose — PONTUS is here.
Join the Community
