20-Minute Ferry Day Trips from Mykonos: Marble Villages of Tinos and Neoclassical Syros

Look just six miles across the water north and west from Mykonos and you see the towering mountain silhouettes of two neighbouring islands that offer a completely authentic, local Greek island experience at half the price of Mykonos: Tinos (only 20 minutes by ferry from Mykonos Tourlos Port) and Syros (the administrative capital of the Cyclades, 30 to 45 minutes by ferry). Multiple ferries run back and forth from morning until evening, making either island an effortless day trip.

1. Tinos Island (20 Minutes by Ferry, Marble Villages, Dovecotes & Pilgrimage)

Known across Greece for three extraordinary traditions, Tinos is a revelation for travellers who love art, hiking and food:

• The Church of Panagia Evangelistria (In Tinos Town, 5 mins from the Ferry): the most important Orthodox pilgrimage sanctuary in Greece (the "Lourdes of the Aegean"), built in 1823 of gleaming white Tinian marble around a miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary, approached up a carpeted marble avenue.
• Pyrgos (Panormos), Volax & Kardiani (The Marble Villages): for 2,500 years, Tinos has been the home of Greece's greatest marble sculptors (inscribed by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage). Take a local bus or rental car to Pyrgos, where every doorway fanlight, fountain, street sign and even the bus stop is hand-carved from white and green Tinian marble, and where the Museum of Marble Crafts stands, continuing to Volax and cliff-hanging Kardiani, passing hundreds of ornate geometric stone Venetian dovecotes (peristeriones) in the valleys.

2. Syros Island & Ermoupoli (30 to 45 Minutes by Ferry, The Neoclassical Capital)

Step off the ferry in Ermoupoli on Syros and you will think you have landed in 19th-century Venice or Trieste rather than the Cyclades. Founded in the 1820s as Greece's primary shipping and industrial port before Piraeus grew, Ermoupoli rises up two twin hills (one crowned by the Catholic Cathedral of St George in medieval Ano Syros, the other by the Orthodox Church of the Resurrection):

• Miaouli Square, Apollo Theatre (1864) & Vaporia: walk across the palm-lined marble plaza of Miaouli Square (dominated by Ernst Ziller's monumental 1876 City Hall), tour the 1864 Apollo Theatre (a miniature wooden-and-velvet scale replica of Milan's Teatro alla Scala), and swim off the concrete sea-platforms beneath the pastel neoclassical sea-captains' palaces of the Vaporia quarter before buying rose-and-mastic Syros loukoumia (Turkish delight) for the evening ferry back to Mykonos.