Best Greek islands to visit

Have you thought about visiting the Greek islands in winter? If you only like swimming and partying then you probably haven’t, but if you’re a fan of unique (and almost entirely deserted) towns, awesome scenery and warmish (but perfect for walking) weather, you should probably skip the high season and go in winter (unless you’re travelling alone and want to meet other people as some of the islands get very quiet).

Here are 4 reasons why you should visit the Greek islands in winter (it was going to be 5 but I ran out of ideas…).

It’s Cheap to visit the Greek Islands in winter!

If you’re travelling Europe on a budget and want to check out the Greek islands, you’d better do it in winter (or at least not in the middle of summer). The islands get very quiet and while some hotels close up completely, others remain open and discount their rooms drastically. We paid around €18 on most of the islands and the quality of the rooms was great. We usually had a kitchen and the locations were perfect. We paid €30 in Ios, and I looked at the high season rates and they were over €100 – we would never have been able to afford to stay in that place in summer. Also, keeping costs down becomes a lot easier if you have a kitchen. We cooked our own meals a lot and our day to day costs were probably the cheapest we experienced in Europe.

You won’t see many other tourists

We saw a few tourists on Santorini, which is probably one of the most popular islands in Greece. At each site, beach or town there were no more than 10 other tourists around, and sometimes there were none. We did a 4 hour walk from Fira to Oia and saw 2 other groups the whole time- that wouldn’t happen in summer! The other islands were even quieter, and by the time we got to Paros we were wondering if there were any other tourists on the whole island (check out to see if we found any).