From Santorini airport to Fira

The bus: it’s always there

The bus stop sits right against the departures building, a step away, and the island buses take you to Fira in about ten minutes. It’s the option that solves the problem: it doesn’t depend on taxis existing, there’s nothing to book and it runs at a decent frequency.

Two practical things that throw arrivals. First: don’t look for a ticket machine or a booth, because there are none. You buy the ticket from the conductor inside the bus, once seated, and he comes round. Carry some loose cash.

Second: almost everything changes at Fira. The island’s network works as a star, with the capital at the centre, so if you’re going to Oia, Perissa or Kamari, the route means getting off at Fira and taking another. It isn’t direct, but it’s predictable and it’s what everyone does.

The taxi: thirty on the whole island

The figure bears repeating because nobody believes it until they suffer it: there are around thirty taxi licences on the entire island. Not thirty at the airport: thirty in total, including the ones currently taking someone from Oia to Perissa or waiting at the port for a ferry to dock.

The consequence in high season, when several flights land close together, is a queue that can reach an hour and a half. And it isn’t a fast-moving queue: there physically aren’t any cars.

The solution, if you want a taxi, is to book ahead, before flying, with a pre-arranged transfer. Then the car is waiting and there’s no problem. Improvising on the kerb is what doesn’t work.

And if you land at night or out of season, things ease considerably, but the number of cars is still the same.

The car and the quad bike

Plenty of people hire a car or a quad bike at the airport, and there’s logic to it: the island is small and it frees you from depending on thirty taxis. If you do, two warnings worth more than any route advice.

The first is parking: Oia and Fira weren’t built for cars, the streets are donkey-width and in summer finding a space at peak times is a battle you lose.

The second is more serious: quads and scooters are this island’s classic and so are the accidents. The roads have tight bends, plenty of loose gravel on the verges, and people driving in swimwear and flip-flops who have never ridden one in their lives. You see bandages everywhere every summer. If you rent one, helmet, clothing that covers and calm. And if you’ve been drinking, don’t even think about it: here that ends badly with depressing frequency.

The port, which is another story

It’s worth knowing even if you arrive by plane, because half the people you’ll meet came by sea and because you may leave that way. Santorini has two ports and they aren’t interchangeable. Athinios, below the cliff, is the one for real ferries, the ones bringing cars and people from other islands. And the old port, at the foot of Fira, is only for small boats and the cruise ships’ tenders.

Athinios is organised chaos: it’s wedged at the foot of a wall with a zigzag road climbing away, and when a ferry docks it fills with buses, taxis and people all at once, in a minuscule space. The island buses run there and depart coordinated with the boats.

From the old port, by contrast, there are only three ways up to Fira: five hundred and eighty-eight steps, the cable car or a donkey. No road reaches it.