chios travel guide

Avgonyma and Anavatos One kilometre after the turning for Aghii Pateras, the main road reaches the watershed and begins to descend the western slopes of the island through a wild area, densely [...]

The Central West Coast The road from Chios via Avgonyma meets the west coast road at 23km. This wild and dramatic coastline is regularly punctuated by cylindrical, mediaeval Genoese watchtowers, [...]

Chios Travel Guide – Best of Chios Island: History, beaches, places to visit & more.   …Grand and solitary, rich in architecture and flora, Chios is more than any island in the [...]

Southern Chios & the Mastic villages This itinerary follows, in clockwise direction, the loop-road southwest from Chios town, via Armolia, Pyrgi­, Mesta, and back to Chora via Vessa and [...]

General Grand and solitary, rich in architecture and flora, but tinged with a note of tragedy that lingers from the events of its long and complex history, Chios is—perhaps more than any island [...]

The Mastic Villages The hilly landscape of the south of Chios is dominated by the cultivation of mastic trees, and the villages in this area were the centres of production for the gum. Mastic [...]

History An exceptional fall of snow on the island accompanied the birth of Chios, the son of Poseidon, after whom the island was subsequently named, according to legend. But Isidoros the [...]

Mastic The evergreen mastic tree (Pistacia lentiscus) is low, dense and ‘sculpted’ in form, with dark leathery leaves and a rough, corrugated bark from which it spontaneously weeps a pale yellow, [...]

Chios town and the Kampos area The setting of the city of Chios, between the island’s eastern shore and the limestone rockfaces of the mountains that rise steeply to between 700 and 800m behind, [...]

Pyrgi The largest and most important of the Mastic Villages— because of its central position in the area—is * Pyrgi­ (23km from Chora). The village is most vividly memorable for its idiosyncratic [...]