Rhodes is two islands wearing one name. There is the walled medieval town at the northern tip, and there are 1,400 square kilometres of everything else, most of which visitors never reach because the airport and the hotels are all within 20 minutes of each other. This page is about the gap between those two versions, and it ends with a plain note about where this agency works, since the search that brings people here often assumes wrongly.
The Old Town is a living town, not a site
The walls run four kilometres and enclose a place where roughly 6,000 people still live, which is the detail that separates Rhodes from every reconstructed old quarter in the Mediterranean. The Knights of St John built it in the 14th century, the Ottomans added minarets and hammams, the Italians restored it heavily in the 1930s, and all three layers are visible on the same street.
Go in the morning or after 8pm. Between 10am and 4pm the cruise ships empty into the Street of the Knights and the whole thing becomes a queue, but by nine in the evening the day-trippers have gone, the lanes behind Socratous are quiet, and you can hear your own footsteps on stones that have been walked since the Crusades.
Two coasts, two different holidays
The west coast faces the open Aegean. It gets the wind, the water is rougher, the beaches are pebble and grey sand, and it is where the windsurfers go. The east coast is sheltered, warmer, calmer, and where almost every resort was built.
That single fact decides most trips. If the meltemi is blowing hard, and from mid-July into August it often blows for three or four days without stopping, the west is unusable and everyone shifts east. Book a west-coast hotel in August and you have effectively booked the wind.
Lindos, and the honest version of it
Lindos is 50km south, an hour by road, and it deserves the reputation: a white village under an acropolis on a headland, with a bay below that looks unreal from the top. It is also, in July, close to unwalkable by midday.
Arrive before nine or come at six in the evening. The climb to the acropolis takes 20 minutes on worn stone that is genuinely slippery, the donkeys at the bottom are a tourist trap most residents would rather did not exist, and the village lanes are so narrow that two people with bags cannot pass. None of that makes it less worth doing. It just means the postcard was taken at a specific hour.
The things nobody mentions
- Butterfly Valley only has butterflies from June to September, and they are Jersey tiger moths rather than butterflies. Do not clap at them; it exhausts them and there are signs asking you not to.
- The Valley of Seven Springs has a 186 metre pitch-black tunnel you wade through in ankle-deep water. It is not for everyone and there is a path around it.
- Prasonisi, at the southern tip, is a sandbar with the Aegean on one side and the Mediterranean on the other, and in high summer you can stand with a foot in each. It vanishes under water in winter.
- The island is big. Rhodes Town to Prasonisi is 90km each way on roads that are slow in the last third. That is a full day, not an afternoon.
Where we work
Athens and Mykonos. There is no branch on Rhodes, no partner in the Dodecanese, and no arrangement that can be made on this island under our name. If somebody tells you otherwise on Rhodes, they are not connected to us in any way.
Most trips to the Dodecanese connect through Athens, and there are direct flights from Rhodes to the capital that take under an hour. If the Athens leg of your trip involves an overnight, the Athens page is the one that applies. For the Cyclades in season, so is Mykonos.
