Things to do in Evia

Evia is the second-biggest island in Greece and you drive to it, which is why it barely feels like an island at all. What is on it divides cleanly into three: a tidal oddity at the bridge, a thermal north still recovering from fire, and a classical centre and south.

The Euripus strait, which is the first thing to do when you cross. At Chalkida the current in the narrow strait reverses direction on a near-daily rhythm. The water runs one way for hours, slows, falls to a dead-still slack for a few minutes, then turns and flows back the other way. Around the equinoxes the pattern breaks: the current runs strongest and switches without the pause.

Why this page prints no numbers for it. The rough interval between reversals and the length of the slack are figures worth checking rather than trusting, because they shift and get misquoted. The commonly repeated ones appear only in journalism and personal academic pages, and no hydrographic primary was opened, so we give none.

How to see it, which costs nothing. Stand on the old sliding bridge in the town centre, lean on the railing, and watch the surface boil, still itself, and turn. Ten minutes, no boat and no ticket, which makes it the natural first stop for anyone arriving over the bridge. Aristotle studied the strait and could not fully explain it; the mechanism is tidal, the two bodies of water either side of the pinch filling and draining at slightly different rates.

Loutra Edipsou, in the north. Geothermal, mineral-rich hot water surfaces along the shore and has been used since antiquity, when the springs were known as the Herculean baths, and a belle-epoque spa town grew up around them in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because the springs run hot in winter as well as summer, Edipsos is one of the few Greek destinations that works year-round. Specific celebrity names get repeated all over the tourism web but are hard to tie to a source, so take them as colour rather than fact. The faded grandeur, the sea-front bathhouses and the open-air pools by the water are real enough on their own.

And the honest part about the north. Between the third and the eleventh of August 2021, wildfire burned across the pine forests of northern Evia, around Istiaia and the inland villages. The recovery is a matter of decades rather than seasons: the specialists who studied the burn put full forest recovery at twenty to twenty-five years, and most of what has greened back so far has come from the Aleppo pine reseeding itself rather than from a replanting programme. So expect a landscape in the middle of that process, not a wasteland and not a restored forest. That is what it looked like when this page was last checked, in July 2026, and it changes year by year, so look at recent photographs before you build expectations around it.

Coming here helps. In 2022 The New York Times placed northern Evia on its 52 Places for a Changed World list, framing a visit as a way to put money into a region working its way back, and spending in the tavernas and rooms of the north is part of that. Sustainable travel in Greece covers the wider idea.

Eretria, in the centre. One of the powerful city-states of ancient Greece, with its excavated ruins and archaeological museum inside the modern town of the same name, a low-key beach town on the gentle west coast that fills with Athenian weekenders in summer.

Kymi, on the east coast. Standing on a green balcony above the sea, which is why locals call it the balcony of the Aegean, and its port is where the ferry leaves for Skyros.

Lake Dystos, southeast of Aliveri. The honest answer to the lake-in-Evia question: a shallow, seasonal wetland beneath the ruins of ancient Dystos on its hill, valued mainly for birdwatching, and often low or dry rather than a brimming lake. Check the season before you plan a visit around water.

Our Evia guide has the practicalities and the beaches cover the coasts.