Things to do in Serifos

Serifos is bare in a way the greener Cyclades are not: rock, low scrub and very little shade. What it has instead are two things almost no other Greek island can offer together, and they sit at opposite ends of the same small island.

The Chora, which is the reason to come. The village is built up a cone of rock above the port, in tiers, with a ruined Venetian kastro on the summit and white houses packed below it. From the harbour it looks improbable. From the top the whole island and half the western Cyclades are laid out in front of you. The way up is by bus or by a stepped path, and the walk down at dusk is the thing people remember about Serifos long after they have forgotten which beach they swam at.

The mines, which are the other half of the island. Serifos ran on iron ore into the twentieth century, and the coast still carries the evidence: loading piers at Megalo Livadi, rusting machinery, tunnel mouths in the hillsides and the shells of company buildings. Most Greek islands present a fishing or farming past. This one has an industrial past, and the physical remains of it are everywhere along the southwest coast.

The labour history, which belongs in the account. This is also the site of a serious piece of Greek labour history: a miners’ strike here in the early twentieth century ended in deaths and is commemorated on the island. That is not a detail to leave out in favour of the atmosphere, because the atmosphere is a consequence of it.

The honest warning about those remains. They are unfenced and unmanaged rather than a maintained site. There is machinery, there are tunnel mouths, and nobody is supervising. That is precisely what makes them atmospheric and it is also exactly what it sounds like. We are not going to tell you they are safe or unsafe, because no authority publishes an assessment of them and this site does not certify places. What we will say is that they are not a museum and you should treat them as what they are.

The walking between the two. Serifos is small and bare, which means the old paths between the chora, the port and the coast are visible and walkable, and on an island with very little shade the timing of that walk matters more than the distance. Early or late, and carry water. Hiking in Greece is the country picture.

How the island is shaped for a visit. Two or three nights. Serifos rewards a slow visit and punishes a rushed one, because the chora, the mines and the beaches are each a separate trip rather than three stops on one loop. There is no airport; ferries come from Piraeus on the western Cyclades line that also serves Sifnos, Milos and Kythnos. Our Serifos guide has the rest and the beaches cover a coast where facilities are thin almost everywhere.