The Most Beautiful Places in South Aegean
9 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in South Aegean are Oia, Santorini and Hozoviotissa monastery. The list covers 9 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The South Aegean gathers two island groups, the Cyclades and the Dodecanese, scattered across a sea shaped by volcanoes and by more than four thousand years of seafaring. The light and the dry, wind-scoured rock gave rise to the whitewashed villages and windmills associated with Greek islands everywhere, and almost every island carries some trace of the civilisations that passed through, from the Bronze Age Cycladic culture to the Knights of St John.
Santorini is the remnant of a volcano whose great eruption in the Bronze Age left a flooded caldera ringed by cliffs, with white villages strung along the rim. On Milos, Sarakiniko is a cove of pale volcanic rock smoothed by wind and waves into shapes that look almost lunar. On Amorgos, the Hozoviotissa Monastery is built into the face of a sheer cliff high above the sea, a narrow white wall of cells and chapels.
The windmills of Kato Mili on Mykonos stand in a row on a ridge above the town, once grinding grain for the island's ships. Far to the east, on Rhodes, the Acropolis of Lindos crowns a rock above the village and the sea, with the remains of the sanctuary of Athena Lindia inside the walls of a castle built later by the Knights. Each island in the region shows a different face of the same sea.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oia | Most beautiful village | |
| 2 | Santorini | Island | |
| 3 | Hozoviotissa monastery | Monastery | |
| 4 | Acropolis of Lindos | Archaeological site | |
| 5 | Sarakiniko, Milos | Beach | |
| 6 | Delos | Island | ✓ |
| 7 | Monastery of Saint John the Theologian | Monastery | ✓ |
| 8 | Kato Mili Windmills, Mykonos | Windmill | |
| 9 | Tourlitis Lighthouse | Lighthouse |
01 Oia
Οία Θήρας
Greece36.462° N 25.376° E
Image by FabrizioPonchia from Pixabay Oia stretches for almost two kilometres along the northwestern tip of Santorini, perched on the rim of the caldera 70 to 100 metres above the sea.
Did you know? The 1956 earthquake that devastated the village measured about magnitude 7.8, and its strongest aftershock struck just off Santorini's northern coast.
02 Santorini
Σαντορίνη
Greece36.415° N 25.433° E
Image by Gherks from Pixabay Santorini is what remains of a volcano that blew itself apart. The islands of the group — Thera, Therasia, Aspronisi and the young, dark cones of Nea and Palea Kameni in the middle — form a broken ring around a flooded caldera, and on the main island the inner cliff falls more than 300 metres straight to the sea.
Did you know? The name Santorini comes from Saint Irene; the Arab geographer al-Idrisi recorded it as Santurin around 1153–1154.
03 Hozoviotissa monastery
Μονή της Παναγίας της Χοζοβιώτισσας
Greece36.835° N 25.910° E
Apenauta at Italian Wikipedia · Public domain A white wall pressed into a sheer cliff, some 300 metres above the Aegean, the monastery of Panagia Hozoviotissa looks less built than wedged into the rock of Amorgos.
Did you know? Among its treasures is a 15th-century icon of the Virgin attributed to the Cretan school of painting.
04 Acropolis of Lindos
Ακρόπολη της Λίνδου
Greece36.092° N 28.088° E
Image by 11333328 from Pixabay The acropolis of Lindos sits on a sheer rock about 116 metres above the sea on the east coast of Rhodes, and it is one of those places where ancient, medieval and natural drama are stacked on top of each other.
Did you know? The sanctuary's fame reached across the Greek world: Alexander the Great, Ptolemy I, Pyrrhus and Philip V of Macedon all sent offerings to Athena Lindia.
05 Sarakiniko, Milos
Σαρακήνικο Μήλου
Greece36.743° N 24.458° E
dronepicr · CC BY 2.0 On the north shore of Milos the land turns white. Sarakiniko is a stretch of coast where pale volcanic rock — tuff made largely of pumice and ash, laid down by submarine eruptions on the South Aegean Volcanic Arc — has been planed by the north wind and the sea into smooth, rounded waves of stone.
Did you know? One layer is an ancient soil that still holds fossilised plant roots up to 7 centimetres thick, traceable for about a metre.
06 Delos
Δήλος
Greece · 30.5 km from Ermoupolis37.389° N 25.269° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by 1192864 from Pixabay 43 square kilometres — that is covered from shore to hilltop with the ruins of a whole ancient city. Greek myth made it the birthplace of the twins Apollo and Artemis, and for centuries it was one of the most sacred places of the Greek world.
Did you know? The geographer Strabo wrote that the slave market of Delos could handle ten thousand slaves in a single day.
07 Monastery of Saint John the Theologian
Μονή του Αγίου Ιωάννου του Θεολόγου
Greece37.309° N 26.548° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Valeria Casali · CC BY-SA 3.0 Seen from the sea, the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian looks less like a religious house than a castle: a mass of grey battlemented walls on the summit of Patmos, with the white houses of Chora wrapped around it.
08 Kato Mili Windmills, Mykonos
Greece · 34.7 km from Ermoupolis37.444° N 25.326° E
Image by falco from Pixabay On the western edge of Chora, the main town of Mykonos, a row of white windmills stands on a low ridge above the sea.
Did you know? The roof cap carrying the sails could be turned on a central wooden axis, so the miller could swing the mill to face the wind.
09 Tourlitis Lighthouse
Τουρλίτης
Greece37.843° N 24.946° E
anjči · CC BY 2.0 A slim stone tower stands on a single sea-worn rock in the harbour of Chora, the main town of Andros, as if it had grown out of the stone. Steps cut into the rock lead up from the waterline to its door, and the whole outcrop is barely larger than the lighthouse it carries.
Did you know? The 2009 stamp series featured just five of Greece's roughly 120 traditional lighthouses, and Tourlitis appeared on the 57-cent value.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in South Aegean?
- On our list, Oia ranks first, followed by Santorini and Hozoviotissa monastery.
- How was the Santorini caldera formed?
- The caldera formed when a huge volcanic eruption in the Late Bronze Age emptied the magma chamber beneath the island and the centre collapsed, letting the sea flood in. The cliffs of Fira and Oia are the walls of that collapse.
- Why is Sarakiniko white?
- Sarakiniko is made of pale volcanic rock, layers of ash and pumice deposited by ancient eruptions on Milos. Wind and sea have eroded it into smooth, rounded white forms.
- What kinds of places are there to see in South Aegean?
- In our collection, the places in South Aegean are most often islands (2), monasteries (2), beaches (1) and lighthouses (1).
- How many places are on this list in South Aegean?
- The list covers 9 places.