Destinations / The Cyclades
The Cyclades
Two islands covered, and the rest openly missing
Which Cyclades island should you visit?
We are not able to answer that yet, and the shape of our record is the reason. We have slept on three Cycladic islands — Naxos and Ios in July 2025, Paros in July 2024, four nights on each — and spent one evening on Tinos. Only Naxos and Tinos are written up here. On Ios and Paros we logged nothing beyond the room and have not screened the photographs, so those stays are in our record and not yet on this site. Santorini and Mykonos we have not visited with a record running at all. A ranking would therefore rest on two islands we have not published and two we do not know, so what follows is the two we can actually show you.
Guides in The Cyclades
TinosThe pilgrimage church, and one evening of it
NaxosFour nights, four corners of the island, and two pricesCommon questions
Two are written up: Naxos gets the fuller account — four nights, four parts of the island — and Tinos an honest one built on a single 55-minute visit to its pilgrimage church. Both are linked below. Two more are in our record without pages: Ios, four nights in July 2025, and Paros, four nights in July 2024.
Because a booking is not a guide. We hold four nights on each — dates, a property, a total — and almost nothing else: no logged spending on either island, and photographs we have not put through the screening every image here goes through. That is enough to say we were there and nowhere near enough to tell you what they are like. They get pages when the evidence does.
Because we have not been there with a record running. Photographs from an early trip exist in our archive, but they carry no logged prices and, in one case, turned out to be filed under the wrong island entirely. An island gets a page when the evidence for it is solid.
Lodging on three islands, and one figure beyond it. The rooms: $3,230.81 for four nights on Naxos and $3,068.54 for four nights on Ios, both July 2025 and both billed in dollars; Paros in July 2024 was $3,221.85. The one non-lodging figure is a 25,00€ Naxos airport taxi, quoted in euros and paid. Nothing else on any of these islands was ever logged, which is why the Tinos cost page publishes an absence rather than a number.
People plainly do — our own Tinos evening was reached by ferry from Paros, where we were staying, and back the same day. We never logged a crossing time on either leg, so this site gives no ferry durations, for that route or any other.
Naxos, on the evidence we hold: four nights there reached beaches, a town and a mountain interior, and made it obvious how much was still unseen. Tinos we saw properly — one church, thoroughly, in one evening — and our record of the island beyond it is empty. We are deliberately not putting Ios or Paros into that comparison, because we have not published a word about either.