The Most Beautiful Water Wonders in Greece
13 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful water wonders in Greece are Navagio, Ionian Islands and Santorini. The list covers 13 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Greece has the longest coastline in the Mediterranean, broken into thousands of islands and peninsulas. Most of it is limestone, which leaves little silt in the sea and grinds down into white pebbles and pale sand, so the water over it turns an intense, transparent blue. In the Aegean a volcanic arc adds black and white rock of a different kind, from the drowned caldera of Santorini to the bleached tuff of Milos.
Navagio on Zakynthos is a cove reachable mainly by sea, closed in by sheer cliffs, with the rusting wreck of a stranded ship on its sand. Santorini wraps around the flooded crater of a Bronze Age eruption, its villages perched on the rim high above the water. Voidokilia in the Peloponnese is a near-perfect semicircle of sand beside the Bay of Navarino, and on Kefalonia Myrtos lies as a strip of white pebbles under steep mountain slopes.
Crete brings three very different shores: the shallow turquoise lagoon of Balos at the tip of the Gramvousa peninsula, the narrow rock inlets of Seitan Limania, and the pink-tinged sand of Elafonisi. Sarakiniko on Milos looks like a moonscape of wind-carved white volcanic rock, and Porto Timoni on Corfu is a double bay split by a thin isthmus. Delos, small and almost treeless, was one of the most sacred islands of the ancient Greek world, the mythical birthplace of Apollo and Artemis.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Navagio | Beach | |
| 2 | Ionian Islands | Island | |
| 3 | Santorini | Island | |
| 4 | Voidokilia Beach | Beach | |
| 5 | Balos Lagoon | Lagoon | |
| 6 | Myrtos Beach | Beach | |
| 7 | Porto Katsiki | Beach | |
| 8 | Sarakiniko, Milos | Beach | |
| 9 | Delos | Island | ✓ |
| 10 | Porto Timoni | Beach | |
| 11 | Seitan Limania | Beach | |
| 12 | Voutoumi Beach | Beach | |
| 13 | Elafonisi Beach | Beach |
01 Navagio
Ναυάγιο
Greece37.860° N 20.625° E
dronepicr · CC BY 2.0 The most repeated version of the story says the Panagiotis was running contraband cigarettes from Turkey, bound for Italian buyers, when the pursuit forced her into the cove. It's the story every boat guide tells, but it was never proven: the captain was never convicted of smuggling, and no official source ever confirmed the cargo. Nearly half a century later, what actually happened that night is still disputed rather than settled fact.
Did you know? A Greek newspaper report in October 1980 put the cargo at about 2,000 cases of cigarettes, valued at some 30 million drachmas.
02 Ionian Islands
Επτάνησα
Greece37.800° N 20.700° E
Image by shogun from Pixabay That layering is easiest to read in Corfu Town, whose Old Town was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2007: a Venetian citadel cut off from the town by a sea-filled moat, narrow paved lanes called kantounia, and a broad esplanade between fortress and houses. The landscape set pieces lie further south.
Did you know? From 1815 the islands were a British protectorate called the United States of the Ionian Islands, and islanders took up afternoon tea and cricket.
03 Santorini
Σαντορίνη
Greece36.415° N 25.433° E
Image by Gherks from Pixabay That same eruption preserved Akrotiri on the south coast, a prosperous Bronze Age town whose multi-storey houses, drains and streets were sealed under ash before the blast. Its wall paintings — scenes of daily life, ritual, animals and ships — are among the most vivid images to survive from the Aegean Bronze Age.
Did you know? Ancient writers say that before it was called Thera the island bore the name Kallistē, meaning the most beautiful one.
04 Voidokilia Beach
Βοϊδοκοιλιά
Greece36.964° N 21.663° E
Grzontan · CC BY-SA 3.0 The bay is framed by rock at both ends, and history clings to it. On the southern headland stand the ruins of Paleokastro, the Old Navarino Castle, a Frankish fortress built in the 1280s overlooking both the lagoon and the great bay of Navarino. Below its walls opens a cave that local tradition links with King Nestor of Pylos, the wise old ruler of Homer's poems; archaeologists have been investigating it since the 1870s.
Did you know? The tholos tomb above the beach is about 5 metres across, its floor covered with pebbles, and it held around seven burials.
05 Balos Lagoon
Λιμνοθάλασσα του Μπάλου
Greece · 39.5 km from Chania35.582° N 23.589° E
dronepicr · CC BY 2.0 The colours are what people remember: white sand shot through with a pinkish tinge from crushed shells, water shallow enough to wade across wide stretches, and the grey-brown limestone slopes of the peninsula, scrubby and treeless, closing the view on three sides. The best way to see its shape is from the path that descends from the ridge above, where the whole lagoon opens below like a map.
Did you know? In August 1825 several hundred Cretan rebels disguised as Turks captured the Gramvousa fortress by surprise.
06 Myrtos Beach
Greece38.344° N 20.536° E
- Blue Flag
Image by shogun from Pixabay The colours have a simple explanation. The surrounding rock is marble, a metamorphosed limestone, and the beach is made of its rounded white cobbles, which grow smaller towards the waterline. The beach shelves steeply, so the waves arrive with a lot of energy; as they curve along the shore they pick up fine particles of marble and carry them in pale plumes, and this suspended powder gives the water its milky turquoise colour.
Did you know? A small coastal cave at one end of the beach has two openings, one reached from the land and the other from the sea.
07 Porto Katsiki
Greece38.602° N 20.549° E
- Blue Flag
Image by ioana_radu from Pixabay The name means "goat port", and the story goes that before modern roads only goats could reach it. The beach became widely known only in the 1990s, after a road was built out to the south-west of the island near the village of Athani. Even so, the last part of the approach remains a stairway down the cliff face from a car park on top, which is also the best place to take in the whole curve of the cove from above.
Did you know? The magnitude 6.5 earthquake of 17 November 2015 struck just 11 km below the surface and set off landslides along Lefkada's west coast.
08 Sarakiniko, Milos
Σαρακήνικο Μήλου
Greece36.743° N 24.458° E
dronepicr · CC BY 2.0 The landscape is what people come for, and it rewards slow looking. The west side is the famous moonscape, a sculpted plain of grey-white ridges and hollows; the east side is drier and rougher, scattered with hardy plants. Up close the rock is soft and grainy, and in places it holds fossils — molluscs, sea urchins, bivalves — trapped when the ash settled on an ancient sea floor.
Did you know? Some beds are twisted and contorted, a sign read by geologists as earthquakes shaking the sediments before they had hardened.
09 Delos
Δήλος
Greece · 30.5 km from Ermoupolis37.389° N 25.269° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by 1192864 from Pixabay The sanctuary of Apollo grew into a dense cluster of temples, treasuries and porticoes. Among them are the Doric Temple of the Delians, the Oikos of the Naxians with its long hall and single row of Ionic columns, and the base of a colossal Naxian kouros. The island's sanctity shaped its history: a purification in 426 BC decreed that no one should be born or buried on Delos.
Did you know? The island produced no food, fibre or timber of its own, so everything was imported, and cisterns and aqueducts husbanded its scarce water.
10 Porto Timoni
Greece · 25.3 km from Corfu39.717° N 19.650° E
Przemek Pietrak · CC BY-SA 3.0 The beach itself is made of pebbles and coarse shingle rather than sand, and the water is extraordinarily clear, shading from pale aquamarine close to the shore to deep blue a few metres out. The isthmus ties a rocky headland to the coast of Corfu, and there is no building, no road and no service at the water's edge. The charm of the place is exactly this simplicity: you can swim on one side, cross the few metres of stones, and swim on the other.
Did you know? From the Afionas ridge the view runs north-west across the sea to the small Diapontia Islands off the coast of Corfu.
11 Seitan Limania
Σεϊτάν Λιμάνια
Greece · 16.7 km from Chania35.552° N 24.194° E
Image by KatarzynaTyl from Pixabay The name Seitan Limania comes from Turkish and means the devil's harbours, a reminder that sailors once feared these inlets: when the wind rises the sea surges into the narrow channels, and the coves offered no safe anchorage. The place is also known as Stefanou beach, as Agios Rafael after a church at the mouth of the gorge, and as Agios Spyridon after an old chapel built into the rock.
Did you know? The steep cliffs and the strong currents along this coast are what earned the inlets their Ottoman-era name of the devil's harbours.
12 Voutoumi Beach
Greece39.150° N 20.233° E
Kakolyri Maria · CC BY-SA 4.0 The setting is simple and that is its strength. Thick Mediterranean scrub and trees come down almost to the water, and the slope behind the beach hides the rest of the island. The pebbles are bright and rounded, and when the sea is calm the visibility makes swimming here feel like snorkelling even without a mask. Nearby, the sandy beach of Vrika and the pebbly Mesovrika complete the island's short list of beaches, each in its own small bay.
Did you know? The island and the sea around it are a Natura 2000 site, with Posidonia seagrass meadows and coralligenous reefs below about 30 metres.
13 Elafonisi Beach
Greece35.271° N 23.540° E
- Blue Flag
dronepicr · CC BY 2.0 The islet is a protected nature reserve and part of the Natura 2000 network, covered with low dunes where more than a hundred rare plant species grow. Crossing through the shallows onto the islet is part of the experience: in fine weather the lagoon is shallow enough to wade, and the dunes beyond give a view back over the whole pattern of sand and sea.
Did you know? The dunes shelter the rare Androcymbium rechingeri, a protected flowering plant endemic to Crete.
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 water wonders in Greece?
- On our list, Navagio ranks first, followed by Ionian Islands and Santorini.
- Why is the sand at Elafonisi pink?
- The colour comes from crushed fragments of shells and tiny red-shelled marine organisms mixed into the pale sand. It is strongest at the water's edge and in the shallows between the beach and the islet.
- How did the Santorini caldera form?
- A massive eruption in the late Bronze Age emptied the magma chamber beneath the island, and the ground collapsed into the sea. The cliffs where Fira and Oia stand today are the inner walls of that flooded crater.
- Why is Delos important?
- In Greek myth Delos is the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, and for centuries it was a major religious sanctuary and trading port. The whole island is an archaeological site and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- How many lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches are on this list in Greece?
- The list covers 13 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches.