Day Trips from Milos

Ten minutes across the strait, Kimolos trades Milos' tourist buses for donkeys and a single windmill. Chorio's maze of whitewashed lanes smells of baking bread and wild thyme, while the volcanic beach at Prassa steams with sulfur springs at low tide.

Polyaigos is a protected nature reserve of white marble cliffs, monk seal lairs, and beaches that look photoshopped. You'll snorkel through sapphire water, picnic on sand so fine it squeaks, and not see another soul except maybe a lighthouse keeper.

Folegandros pitches itself skyward on a cliff so steep the bus driver taps the horn before every bend. The cliff-top Hora is a tumble of cube houses and bougainvillea, and the old kastro smells of wood-fired chickpeas drifting from taverna chimneys.

Sifnos is the pottery island, you'll hear wheels humming in every village and smell clay dust mixed with orange blossom. Beyond the ceramics, it dishes up perhaps the best food in the Cyclades and a string of terracotta-roofed villages connected by ancient stone paths.

Antiparos pairs a chichi main town with raw, windy beaches, while the uninhabited islet of Despotiko holds a newly excavated sanctuary to Apollo. You'll swim, explore marble quarries, and finish with grilled squid in a fishing cove scented with cedar smoke.

Serifos is what Milos might have felt like thirty years ago: a sugar-cube Hora stacked under a medieval fortress, beaches where the only soundtrack is cicadas, and tavernas that still serve horta picked that morning from the hillside.