Is Oia, Santorini Worth Visiting?

Is Oia worth it? It’s ridiculously beautiful, but it’s also expensive, crowded and home to one of the strangest sunset rituals I’ve ever witnessed while traveling. We went to see whether Santorini’s most famous village actually lives up to the hype. Here’s my answer.

Kristen Cummings

Adventure, Couples

Santorini, Greece

August 29, 2021

September 27, 2026

So, Is Oia Worth It?

When Jason and I traveled to Greece for the first time, we knew we wanted to visit Crete. But we also felt compelled, and even weirdly drawn, to see Santorini. It’s one of those bucket-list destinations that feels like something you have to do at least once.

With hundreds of inhabited Greek islands, many with gorgeous landscapes, history and the whitewashed Cycladic architecture I’d been dreaming about, why Santorini?

Maybe it beckoned us like the song of Homer’s sirens.

Or maybe it was the approximately eleventy-billion photos of Santorini I’d seen on Instagram.

Either way, we went.

And I have thoughts.

Joining the crowds in Oia because you’re seen it all over Instagram is touristy. Finding your own little corner of the Greek islands is touristish.

What Oia Is Actually Like

Oia is the village on the northern end of Santorini that you probably picture when somebody says “Santorini”: white buildings stacked down the cliff, blue-domed churches, winding pedestrian paths and the caldera stretching out below.

And when we first walked into Oia, it was just as stunning as I hoped it would be.

Around every corner, it somehow got prettier. Look down, look ahead, look behind you, look above you. Everything is built on top of everything else, with hidden pathways and staircases going in every direction. Oia isn’t beautiful from one particular viewpoint. It feels like walking around inside a three-dimensional painting.

Where are my ’80s kids?

Remember one of the final scenes of Labyrinth, when Baby Toby, the Goblin King and Sarah are on those stairs going upside-down and sideways and Sarah is trying to figure out how to get to the baby?

That’s Oia.

“Hey! What a cool church at the bottom of the hill! I wonder how we get down there?”

And somehow getting to it involves walking uphill, back where you came from and finding an entirely different set of stairs.

But I digress.

Santorini and the Problem With Overtourism

Of course, we were hardly the first people to discover that Oia is pretty.

Santorini has roughly 20,000 permanent residents, but welcomed about 3.4 million visitors in 2023. That volume of tourism has created real pressure on infrastructure, housing and daily life on the island.

And this isn’t just travelers complaining that there are too many other travelers in their sunset photos. Santorini is actively trying to manage the problem.

For 2026, the island’s official cruise policy limits cruise traffic to 8,000 passengers per day. Greece has also introduced a cruise-passenger levy that reaches €20 per person from June through September in Santorini and Mykonos.

So yes, overtourism is a real issue here.

And nowhere did we feel it more than Oia.

Oia Is Beautiful. It’s Also Expensive.

When we visited, lodging in Oia was dramatically more expensive than what we had been paying elsewhere in Greece. We had just spent more than a week in Crete, where our money went much further, and the jump in prices when we got to Santorini was noticeable enough that we only stayed on the island for three nights.

Shopping and dining in Oia were more expensive, too.

We started using Greek salad as our extremely scientific economic indicator because it appeared on basically every menu. The same kind of giant Greek salad we’d been ordering in Crete suddenly cost four times more once we got to Oia.

Is that the most rigorous cost-of-living index ever devised?

No.

Was it effective?

Absolutely.

Want to see how expensive Oia is for your dates?
Check Oia hotel and vacation rental prices →

We Stayed Outside Oia Instead

We wanted to experience Oia. We just didn’t particularly want to sleep in the middle of it.

Instead, we stayed in Finikia, a tiny village about a 20-minute walk from Oia.

That turned out to be one of my favorite decisions of the trip.

We could walk into Oia whenever we wanted the caldera views, shops, blue domes and general Santorini spectacle, and then walk right back out when we’d had enough.

And then we could leave.

If I were planning the same trip again, I would absolutely make the same choice.

See places to stay in Finikia →

The Oia Sunset Circus

I can’t stress this enough: Oia at sunset is INSANE.

I knew this before the trip and had actually planned to avoid Oia at sunset. If we’d had a reservation at one of the fancy restaurants with an unobstructed sunset view, that would have been one thing. But we had no interest in throwing elbows with thousands of people just to come home with sunset pictures showcasing thousands of other people.

So we planned to eat at a taverna back in Finikia instead.

Except we were apparently operating on American dinner time, the restaurant was practically empty, and we decided to walk toward Oia to find a nice place to watch the sunset.

This was our mistake.

Like Lemmings, we just kept getting sucked farther and farther into Oia.

Eventually, it became less about wanting to see the sunset and more about wanting to see the spectacle of everyone trying to see the sunset.

And a spectacle it was.

People were flowing in the same direction through narrow cobblestone walkways. We’d reach a landing overlooking the ocean and find hundreds of people crammed together, phones in the air, photographing the sun.

Which I found kind of funny.

What makes sunset in Oia so beautiful isn’t just the sun. It’s the light hitting all those white buildings, turning them pink and gold and throwing shadows across the village.

But everybody was fighting for a photo of… the sun.

You can photograph the sun setting over water in a lot of places. Literally any west-facing beach.

Eventually, I found myself more interested in taking pictures of the people taking pictures of the sunset.

We eventually found a spot near a windmill where we could watch without being packed into the crowd.

But leaving afterward was something else entirely.

Jason pointed out that it felt more chaotic than leaving a rock concert, except now we were on narrow pedestrian paths and staircases with a bunch of day-trippers who seemed increasingly concerned about making it back to their buses and ferries.

If crowds or claustrophobia are a problem for you, this is not the Santorini experience I’d recommend.

The Tourists Behaving Badly Part

There was another side of Oia that bothered me more than the sheer number of people.

People actually live here.

We saw signs reminding visitors of exactly that: “It’s your holiday… but it’s our home.”

And yet we still watched tourists climb over barriers, wander into private areas and use people’s homes as Instagram sets.

Some came prepared for a full photo shoot, complete with flowing dresses, photographers and increasingly complicated instructions to whoever had been assigned Instagram Boyfriend duty.

I have questions about wearing high heels on Oia’s steep cobblestone paths, but that is between those women, their ankles and God.

Does that mean Jason and I didn’t take pictures in Oia?

Of course we did.

I am not going to stand in one of the most photogenic places I’ve ever seen and suddenly become morally opposed to vacation photos.

But no alleyways were blocked, no homes were trespassed, no fellow tourists were harmed and, sadly, no Instagram modeling careers were launched in the creation of these selfies.

What Surprised Me About Santorini

We had just come from Crete, and that comparison probably shaped a lot of my reaction to Santorini.

In Crete, we ate incredible produce and olive oil and spent time in places where hearing another American accent was unusual. One of our hosts was genuinely surprised that we, as Americans, had ventured beyond Athens and Santorini.

Then we arrived in Santorini and suddenly heard Americans everywhere.

For some travelers, that may be comforting. For me, part of the fun of international travel is feeling like I’ve gone somewhere very different from home, so I missed some of that feeling.

We also met people working on Santorini who came from Georgia, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria, including a driver from Georgia who spent part of each year working on the island and the rest back home.

And yes, I occasionally found my fellow American tourists loud and obnoxious.

But maybe the Europeans were rude tourists too and I just couldn’t understand what they were saying.

There is probably something very peaceful about not knowing when everybody around you is complaining.

How to Experience Oia Without the Worst Crowds

My biggest advice is simple: remember that Oia is not all of Santorini.

If Oia is on your bucket list, go. I genuinely think it’s worth seeing. But you don’t necessarily need to stay there, and you definitely don’t need to spend your entire Santorini trip there.

I’d do a few things differently:

• Stay outside Oia. We loved staying in Finikia, where we could walk to Oia in about 20 minutes and retreat when we’d had enough.
• Visit Oia outside the sunset crush. Wander earlier in the day, enjoy the village and leave before everyone converges on the same handful of viewpoints.
• If sunset is non-negotiable, have a plan. A restaurant reservation with a view, a sunset cruise or another caldera village may be a much more pleasant way to experience it.
• Give the rest of Santorini some attention. Finikia, Imerovigli and Fira all offer very different experiences from Oia.
• Consider shoulder season. If your schedule allows it, spring and fall can help you avoid the absolute peak of summer tourism.

See more places to stay in Imerovigli →

What About Other Greek Islands?

This is where I think Santorini’s Instagram fame sometimes does travelers a disservice.

If what you’re dreaming about is whitewashed Cycladic architecture, narrow lanes, blue water, bougainvillea and beautiful sunsets, Santorini does not have a monopoly on those things.

Paros, Naxos, Milos and other Greek islands deserve a look, too. Even the south side of Crete had that look.

That said, Santorini is unusual. Its villages sit along the rim of an enormous volcanic caldera, and that geography and geology creates views you aren’t going to duplicate exactly somewhere else.

So I wouldn’t tell you, “Skip Santorini. They’re all the same.”

They aren’t.

I’d tell you not to assume Santorini is the only Greek island capable of giving you that holy-crap-I’m-in-Greece feeling.

So… Is Oia Overrated?

A little.

Oia is genuinely spectacular. I’m glad I saw it. Some of the views are burned into my brain, and walking through those impossible little pathways really does feel like being inside a painting.

But the crowds, prices and bizarre sunset frenzy changed the experience for me, and I found myself longing to return to the serenity of Crete.

I also think Oia suffers from the weight of its own reputation. We’ve all seen those perfectly framed photographs of blue domes hanging over the caldera with approximately zero other humans in sight. Then you arrive and discover that 600 people are standing just outside the frame.

That doesn’t make Oia fake or bad.

It just means the Instagram version and the actual experience are not quite the same thing.

Would I Go Back to Oia?

Meh… probably not.

Not because I had a bad experience. I didn’t. Oia was very cool, ridiculously beautiful and absolutely worth seeing once.

There are just too many other places in the world I still want to see, including a whole bunch of Greek islands.

If somebody surprised me with a trip to Santorini tomorrow, would I be sad about it?

Not in the least.

But I’d probably spend most of my time in Finikia, Imerovigli and other parts of the island and make one strategic visit to Oia.

And I would definitely skip going to Oia to see the sunset.

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