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Businesses, flavours and experiences across all the islands — choose a category.
List it for free and showcase it to thousands of visitors.
List now →Discover the beaches, culture, and experiences you must not miss in the Cyclades.
On the hill of Kastro above Ios Town, the ruins of the ancient city - walls, a road leading to the harbour, and the site of the Temple of Apollo where the church of Agia Aikaterini now stands - reveal the historic face of an island known for its nightlife.
Leave the golden sands and the frenetic evening buzz of Chora behind you and climb toward the hill that looms over the harbour. The wind picks up, the sound of music fades, and before you opens a landscape that Ios keeps almost hidden: the ruins of its ancient city, where for centuries the island was something far more serious than a party destination.
The ancient city of Ios is not tucked away in some remote corner of the island, but sits directly above the present-day bay, on the hill of Kastro. The inhabitants of antiquity chose this spot for the same practical reason you might choose a terrace with a view today: from up there, you can see everywhere.
The gaze travels freely as far as Sikinos and Santorini to the south, while to the north the silhouette of Naxos can be made out. This is no accident: the position guaranteed early warning of any approaching ship, friend or foe, at a time when the Aegean Sea was at once a trade route and a source of danger.
Scrambling among dry-stone walls and wild scrub, you come across surviving sections of the ancient fortification wall, building foundations and traces of the road that led from the city down to the harbour since the earliest of times. These stones, dry and warm from the sun, are what remains of a community that lived, organised itself and fortified this height more than two thousand years ago.
As you walk among the ruins, you sense the scale of life this rock once sheltered: not monumental grandeur, but the persistent, austere architecture of a Cycladic city-state, built to withstand wind, war and time.
On this same summit, antiquity and Byzantine tradition meet in an almost moving way. On the spot where a temple dedicated to Apollo once stood, the small chapel of Agia Aikaterini rises today. A change of worship on the same sacred rock is not a rare phenomenon in the Cyclades, but here it becomes especially tangible: you stand on the very spot where, centuries before, the inhabitants of ancient Ios climbed to honour the god of light and prophecy.
No account of ancient Ios is complete without the legend that has accompanied the island from generation to generation: that here, according to ancient tradition, Homer himself met his end. This claim, however unconfirmed historically it remains, earned Ios the title “island of Homer” and partly explains why the passage from today’s frenetic nightlife to the ancient ruins of Kastro feels so natural: one does not cancel out the other, it simply adds one more layer to the story of a place that has always known how to captivate.
When you reach the summit, the Aegean spreads out before you in its full extent, and there you understand why the ancient inhabitants of Ios chose to live up high, exposed to the wind but masters of the view. The sunset from here, with its colours spilling over the stones, turns the visit into something more than sightseeing; it becomes a moment of reflection, a brief pause between the carefree ease of the beach and the weight of a history thousands of years old.
At the top of this rock, Ios remembers who it was before it became what it is today.
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