A Chios itinerary: four days and a hire car

This is not a beach you park on for a weekend. It is a place you tour by car, with villages, a monastery and quiet coves spread across a large island. Give it four days and a rental car, aim for the stone and the resin over the beach clubs, and it pays you back. Everything else is in the Chios guide.

Before you book: it is a driving island

Hold three facts together and the plan writes itself. Chios is one of the largest Greek islands. Its draws sit scattered across the south and the interior. Its one real town, Chios Town, sits on the east-central coast, with the port there and the airport just to the south.

You cannot see Chios on foot or from a single base without driving. The distances between the villages, the monastery and the good beaches are exactly why a car matters here more than on most islands. Renting a car in Greece covers the practicalities.

Day 1: Chios Town and the Kampos

Start where you land. Chios Town, which locals call Chora, is a working port rather than a picture-postcard one, with a castle quarter and a good archaeological museum.

The thing to see on the first day is just south of it: the Kampos, a district of walled estates, each a mansion behind a high wall with its own citrus orchard, cistern and monumental gate. The Genoese laid the plan down after they took the island and the Ottomans left it largely intact, and driving or cycling the lanes between those walls is unlike anywhere else in Greece.

Some of the estates take visitors. Even from the lane, the scale of the gates tells you what this island once was.

Day 2: the mastic villages

The day to build the trip around. The mastic villages of the south are medieval and fortified, built as closed blocks with the outer houses forming the wall and the lanes running like tunnels between them, because a crop this valuable needed defending.

Pyrgi is the famous one, its houses covered in grey and white geometric xysta patterns cut into the plaster, and it is genuinely startling in person. Mesta is the best-preserved as a piece of medieval town planning, a maze of vaulted lanes with a fortified church at the centre.

Do both, with a village lunch between them. They are close enough together for one day and different enough to be worth doing as a pair.

Day 3: Nea Moni, and the interior

Nea Moni is an eleventh-century monastery in the hills west of Chios Town, on the UNESCO World Heritage list for its gold-ground mosaics. They are the finest Byzantine mosaics on any Greek island and they are the other reason to come.

The setting matters too. The monastery sits alone in the hills, and the drive up out of the town and into the interior is the moment the island stops being a port and starts being a landscape.

Continue west and north afterwards. The north of Chios is rougher, more mountainous, emptier and slower to cross, and an afternoon of it puts the busy south in context.

Day 4: the coves

Chios has quiet beaches rather than famous ones, and they are spread far apart, so pick a coast rather than a list. Mavra Volia in the south is the striking one, a beach of black volcanic pebbles below dark cliffs, and it pairs naturally with the mastic villages if you would rather split them across two days.

The west coast is emptier still and needs the drive. Whichever you choose, this is a day of one beach rather than three.

How to adapt this

Two days. The mastic villages on one, Nea Moni and the Kampos on the other. That is the essential Chios and it still needs a car.

A week. Add the north properly, the Kampos estates that open to visitors, and a crossing to Cesme on the Turkish coast. Day trips from Chios covers that.

Without a car. Not recommended. Buses serve the main villages but the island is too large and too scattered for a bus-based trip to work, and you would miss the interior entirely.

In spring. The south is green then, which is the season the mastic villages look best, and the interior roads are at their most pleasant.

Where this leaves you

Four days on Chios: the town and the walled Kampos estates on the first, the fortified mastic villages of Pyrgi and Mesta on the second, Nea Moni and the interior on the third, and one good cove on the fourth. Hire a car, treat it as a touring island rather than a beach one, and go for the stone and the resin.

Quick answers

How many days do you need on Chios?

Four with a car. The island is large, its mastic villages and monastery sit far apart, and its one town is on the opposite coast from several of them. Two days covers the villages and Nea Moni if that is all you have.

Do you need a car on Chios?

Yes, emphatically. Chios is one of the larger Greek islands with its draws scattered across the south and interior, and it cannot be seen on foot or from a single base. Buses reach the main villages but not usefully enough to plan around.

What is mastic and where do you see it?

Mastic is a resin harvested from trees that grow commercially nowhere else on earth. The fortified medieval villages of the green south of Chios exist because of it, and Pyrgi and Mesta are the two to visit.

What is Nea Moni?

An eleventh-century monastery in the hills west of Chios Town, on the UNESCO World Heritage list for its gold-ground mosaics. They are the finest Byzantine mosaics on any Greek island, and the drive up into the interior is part of the day.