Boutique Hotels

Santorini

There is a version of Santorini that belongs to everyone — the postcard version, the one that appears on a thousand travel feeds before you ever set foot on the island. Then there is the version you discover when you get there, which is quieter, stranger and considerably more interesting than any photograph suggests. The hotels that matter here are the ones carved into the caldera cliffs rather than built on top of them, the ones with eight suites instead of eighty, the ones where the owner takes your breakfast order and means it when they ask how you slept. Oia gets most of the attention but Imerovigli sits higher on the caldera rim and tends to be calmer. Pyrgos, inland, is where the Santorini that existed before tourism took hold is still visible. The southern coast has a different character entirely — black sand beaches, contemporary design, a less performative kind of luxury. A practical note before you book: almost everything worth staying in involves stairs, sometimes a lot of them. Worth knowing before you arrive, not after.

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