Welcome to Santorini

What you are about to explore is not an island in the ordinary sense. Santorini — officially Thira — is the surviving rim of an enormous volcanic caldera, formed when one of the most powerful eruptions in the last 10,000 years collapsed the center of what was once a circular island. The eruption, estimated at around 1650 BCE, ejected approximately 30 cubic kilometers of magma, sent a 36-kilometer column of ash into the atmosphere, and buried the thriving Bronze Age city of Akrotiri — a city so sophisticated it had multi-story buildings, indoor plumbing, and spectacular wall frescoes.

Today, the crescent-shaped island that survived this catastrophe is home to some of the most iconic imagery on Earth: white-washed cave houses carved into the volcanic cliffs, cobalt-blue church domes catching the Aegean light, and the caldera itself — 11 to 12 kilometers wide, filled with the deep blue Aegean Sea. Two small volcanic islands still rise from the caldera's center, the youngest barely 70 years old after a 1950 eruption.

We will visit eight stops across Santorini's volcanic landscape — from the terraced village of Oia to an active volcanic island you can still walk on, from a buried Bronze Age city to cliffs of blood-red iron-stained rock. Along the way you will discover why the eruption that created this place may have contributed to the collapse of the Minoan civilization, why no human bodies were ever found at Akrotiri, and how to read thousands of years of eruption history in the color-banded cliffs. Let us begin.