Fira, Santorini

Today we woke to the most amazing breakfast, served on our terrace overlooking the brilliant blue sea. This is truly a beautiful place. Not only was our breakfast delicious, we also had some company join us…the local pussycat. We have no idea how he/she got into our terrace area but it certainly made itself at home. Just made us miss Pip.

After we had fuelled up for the morning we headed out to explore Fira, also known as Thira. Fira is the beautiful capital of Santorini, located on the top of a cliff of the Caldera. It is also the biggest and most cosmopolitan settlement of Santorini and where the cruise ships dock on their Greek cruises, so it is usually extremely busy. It wasn’t too far from where we were staying but there were a lot of steps to walk down, which meant there were a lot of steps to walk back up again. Santorini really is a tourist town and there were lots of tourist shops but what I really like is there are shops that sell items unique to the area, lots of artworks made by locals. It was nice to do a bit of window shopping.

We weren’t planning on checking out the tourist sites as we were here to relax and enjoy the area, eat great food, admire the amazing scenery and soak up the gorgeous sunsets. We did check out one church but that was only because we were passing and we hadn’t seen inside a Greek church yet. We stopped at the Catholic Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist, built in 1823, but completely restored and rebuilt in 1970 after the earthquake of 1956. The churches here are so different to those we have seen in Italy. The exteriors are very simple in style with little to no decoration, not statues or gargoyles, just very simplistic shapes with contrasting colours. And while the exteriors are painted in softer tones, the interiors are very colourful and quite elaborate in their decorations with their painted walls, ceilings and arches. It was cool to check inside.

Other than visiting the church, we were quite happy just to wander the streets and admire the views. I love the contrasts of the crisp white buildings and the blue Greek flags against the background of browns and reds of the cliffs and the blue of the sky and the sea. I didn’t realise when booking that the island shuts down on 31st October and we are at the very end of the tourist season. The huge plus with visiting now is there is hardly anyone about so we really get to enjoy the area. We had heard from friends how crowded Santorini is and we were not looking forward to the crowds. This is heaven.

The one thing we really had to see were the famous Santorini donkeys but we had no desire to walk to the harbour and catch a donkey back up. We were quite happy walking down to where the donkeys were kept, which wasn’t too far from the top, taking a few photos and heading back up. We had a very enjoyable morning.Read more