Rhodes
A medieval city people still live in, on an island with two different coasts
- When to go
- October 23° · 2 rainy days
- Per day
- €€€price 3 of 5
- How many days
- 5–7days
- For you
- 6 questions →
- Nearest airport
- 13 km Rhodes
- Right now
Rhodes is a fortified town from the age of the knights where people still keep flats, shops and a school, plus eighty kilometres of island with warm sea around it. The walls run four kilometres and enclose sixty-five hectares of streets; the rest of the island continues another seventy kilometres to the south.
The Knights of St John held the island from 1309 to 1523 and in that time turned a Byzantine citadel into a town. The Street of the Knights is still a straight cobbled line of inns for the order's seven tongues, one for each nation, and the Great Hospital built between 1440 and 1489 is now the archaeological museum. After 1523 the Ottomans added mosques, hammams and minarets on top of all of it. UNESCO listed it in 1988. 'The largest inhabited medieval town in Europe' is the agencies' line, not UNESCO's; what stands without a caveat is 'inhabited' — people still keep house inside the walls.
The Palace of the Grand Master needs one explanation before you go in. The original vanished in 1856, when lightning struck a powder magazine under a nearby church and the explosion took out half the citadel. What you walk through today was built by the Italians between 1937 and 1940 as a summer residence for Victor Emmanuel III and Mussolini, and floored with ancient mosaics shipped in from Kos. Not a fake, but not the Middle Ages either — and the halls stay huge and cold on the worst July day.
The island has two coasts and they behave differently. The west is exposed to the meltemi, which blows from the north most summer afternoons, which is why Ixia and Ialysos are where people windsurf and kite. The east is sheltered and calm and that is where you go with children. The rule settles your accommodation faster than any review: want to swim, go east; want wind, go west. With over three thousand hours of sun a year, mid-October is still season.
Guides for Rhodes
Shorter, practical pages for one concrete question each — how many days, how much money, where to sleep, where to escape the city.
Rhodes in 5 days
→The first two days stay in town, on foot; the other three go by bus, but not the same one — the east and west of the…
Day trips from Rhodes
→Lindos and Kameiros are a half-day by bus; Prasonisi to the south and Symi across the water each need a full day and a…
Where to stay in Rhodes
→Rhodes town is the starting point for both RODA and KTEL Rodou, so it's the one base that doesn't force a choice…
What Rhodes costs
→Greece is in the eurozone, so there's no currency conversion — the bed, food and all four sights have a price here…
Rhodes town beyond the Palace and the Street of the Knights
→A harbour with deer statues and windmills, the oldest synagogue in Greece and a hill with an ancient stadium and no…
What to eat in Rhodes
→Pitaroudia and melekouni aren't on every Greek menu — the two of them, alongside slow-cooked goat, keep Rhodian cooking…
The best time to visit Rhodes
→The date in Rhodes doesn't just change the temperature — it also decides whether the Valley of the Butterflies is even…
Getting around Rhodes
→Two companies split the island like two city lines that never cross — know which runs where, and you rarely wait at the…
Mistakes everyone makes in Rhodes
→Anyone arriving on Rhodes assuming one bus and one ticket cover everything gets it wrong before setting off — RODA…
What to see in Rhodes
The old town and the Street of the Knights
Four kilometres of wall around sixty-five hectares of streets, with a moat that is now a park you can walk for free. The Street of the Knights takes ten minutes to cross and looks best before eight in the morning, while the gates are empty and the ships haven't docked.
free · 10 min (street only)
The Palace of the Grand Master
A courtyard, three hundred metres of corridor and halls floored with mosaics from Kos. Go in the morning; by afternoon everything off the cruise ships is inside.
€20 · closed Tuesday (Nov–Mar) · booking: recommended
Lindos and its acropolis
Forty kilometres south, a white car-free village under a rock carrying a temple of Athena from around 300 BC. Cut into the stairway is a relief of a warship from about 180 BC. Below is St Paul's Bay, an almost closed ring of rock.
€20 · booking: timed slot
The Valley of the Butterflies
Petaloudes is a valley of moths rather than butterflies: Euplagia quadripunctaria rhodosensis flies by day and gathers on the trunks in thousands from July to September to sit out the heat. It doesn't feed at that stage, so every clap and shout literally spends its lifespan — hence the silence rule.
€6 (22 Jun–30 Sep)
Kamiros
One of the island's three Dorian cities, flattened by earthquakes in 226 BC and AD 142, then forgotten until 1859. What survives is a whole street grid on a hillside, houses, an agora and a covered cistern of six hundred cubic metres from the sixth century BC. There is no shade anywhere — come early.
€10 · closed Tuesday (Nov–Mar)
The two coasts
The east is for swimming: Tsambika, Agathi and Kallithea have water without waves and a shallow entry. On the west, at Ixia and Ialysos, you hold your towel in the afternoon rather than lie on it. Both fit in a day by bus, but you pick one to sleep on.
free (beaches)
Stories from Rhodes
How it actually was when we were there, and what was worth it.
Rhodes beyond the package deal, the old town and two coasts
→The island is sold as a week in a hotel on the east coast. What that skips is a town inside four kilometres of walls where people still live.
Two things you probably did not know
The Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders, stood for about fifty years before an earthquake toppled it in 226 BC. The pieces lay on the ground for eight centuries, because an oracle forbade raising it again.
The old town of Rhodes is the largest inhabited medieval town in Europe. The Knights of St John raised the walls in the fifteenth century, and several thousand people still live inside them.
Ready for Rhodes?
Within reach from here
Places sorted by straight-line distance from Rhodes — day trips or weekends.
Greece
→The north by road, the Cyclades by ferry, Rhodes by air — pick the region first and the island second
Turkey
→Istanbul, then one direction: Cappadocia by plane, Ephesus and Pamukkale by train, or the Lycian coast by bus
Montenegro
→The Bay, the riviera or Ulcinj for the sea, Durmitor for July — choose the coast by its beaches and the north by the month
All 277 places we write about sit on one page — narrow them down by continent, country, price or what you are travelling for.
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