Which of the 12 Dodecanese Islands Is Right for You?

The Dodecanese islands split neatly by two questions: how you plan to arrive, and how much you want to move once you get there. Rhodes and Kos suit a first trip, because you can fly straight in. Symi, Patmos and Halki suit a slower one, because reaching them means a boat.

That difference sounds small. In practice it shapes everything, and it is the reason most people start with a list of twelve islands and end up unable to choose. This guide compares all twelve on the things that actually decide a trip, then says plainly which ones suit which kind of traveller.

What are the Dodecanese islands?

The Dodecanese are a group of Greek islands in the southeastern Aegean, strung along the Turkish coast. Their name means “twelve islands”, though the group holds 15 larger and around 150 smaller ones, of which 26 are inhabited. The Dodecanese islands sit further from Athens than the Cyclades, which is why they feel less crowded and why getting to them takes more thought.

They also look different from the Greece most people picture. Italy governed the islands from 1912 until 1943, and the architecture still shows it. You will see wide public squares, ochre and pink neoclassical facades and Art Deco municipal buildings, not only whitewashed cubes.

The 12 Dodecanese islands, compared

If you only read one part of this page, read this. It is the whole of the Dodecanese islands on one screen. The first column is the one that decides most trips.

Can you fly to a Dodecanese island?

You can fly to eight of them. Two have international airports, Rhodes and Kos, and six more have domestic or public-use airfields: Karpathos, Kalymnos, Leros, Astypalaia, Kasos and Kastellorizo. The rest are reached by sea, according to the official list of airports in Greece.

That single fact explains most of the frustration people have planning the Dodecanese islands. Patmos, Symi, Tilos, Halki, Nisyros and Lipsi have no airport at all. They are not remote in any dramatic sense, but they cannot be slotted into a short trip the way an island with a runway can.

So the honest planning rule is simple. Have a week or less, flying in from outside Greece? Build the trip around Rhodes or Kos, and treat the sea-only islands as places you go from there. With longer than that, the boat turns into an asset instead of an obstacle, because the slower islands are the better ones.

The boat is also the part most likely to go wrong, and weather does not care about your booking:

“She [Barbara] immediately contacted us when our ferry was canceled, offered us alternatives, made all the arrangements and then monitored the situation to make sure we arrived safely and with a minimum amount of additional problems. It’s times like these when having a good agent is invaluable.” abulafia, TripAdvisor, May 2026

How quiet is quiet? A number that helps

Quiet here means roughly a fifth of the people per square kilometre, once you leave Rhodes and Kos. Everyone writing about these islands calls the small ones “unspoilt”. This is what the word is worth in practice.

The Kos regional unit covers 337.2 square kilometres and had 38,137 residents at the 2021 Greek census. The Karpathos and Kasos regional unit covers almost exactly the same ground, 374.3 square kilometres, and had 7,790. Same amount of land, roughly a fifth of the people, before a single tourist arrives.

That ratio is the difference between a village where a couple of places stay open in May and one where the whole waterfront does. Neither is better. They are different holidays. Work out which one you are after before you start comparing beaches, because the beaches will not tell you.

Which Dodecanese island suits which traveller

If this is your first time in Greece

Rhodes. The medieval town is walled, lived-in and largely intact. The island is big enough that a week does not exhaust it, and you can fly in without a connection. What it costs you is company. Rhodes is the busiest island in the group, and in July and August the old town is shoulder to shoulder by mid-morning.

Go early or go late in the day, stay outside the walls, and Rhodes rewards you. We cover the island in more depth in our guide to Rhodes and the island of the Knights.

If you want quiet more than sights

Halki or Tilos. Both are small, both are reached by boat, and neither has a list of attractions to work through. That is the appeal. On Halki there is one village, Emborio, wrapped around a harbour of pastel houses, and days there are made of swimming, eating and reading.

Be honest with yourself about this, though. If you get restless without a plan, these islands will frustrate you by day three.

If you are travelling with children

Send the family to Kos. Shallow beaches, flat ground that suits cycling, short distances between everything, and a direct flight. It also has enough ordinary infrastructure that a difficult day is easy to rescue. Rhodes works too, though the driving distances are longer and children tire of medieval streets faster than adults do.

If you walk, climb or want the landscape

Karpathos for walking, Kalymnos for climbing. Karpathos is long, mountainous and windy, with old paths connecting villages that were cut off from each other until recently. Olympos in the north still keeps a distinct dialect and dress, which is the kind of thing that survives when a place is hard to reach. You will want a car, and you will not want to rush. We have written separately about Karpathos and about the experiences worth building a week around there.

Kalymnos is different in character: a working sponge-fishing island whose limestone cliffs brought climbers, and then more climbers. If you do not climb, its beaches are ordinary and you will wonder what the fuss is about.

If you want somewhere with a reason to be there

This one is Patmos. The Monastery of Saint John sits above Chora, and the cave below it is where the Book of Revelation is traditionally said to have been written. That history draws a steady stream of visitors, and the island has grown discreetly elegant around it without turning into a resort.

Patmos suits people who want a place with some weight to it rather than only a beach. Chora is one of the most attractive villages in the Aegean, and the walk up to it at dusk is the best hour on the island. Our guide to Patmos goes into what to do with a few days there.

If you have a long weekend rather than a fortnight

Stay on one island, and make it one with an airport. Three nights split between two islands sounds efficient and feels like packing. Symi is the exception worth considering, because it is close enough to Rhodes that arriving by sea costs you an afternoon rather than a day.

If you are going for the photographs

Symi. The harbour at Gialos is a horseshoe of neoclassical mansions in ochre, cream and faded red, rising steeply from the water. It is worth arriving in daylight for. The catch is timing. Boats from Rhodes unload day-trippers late morning and collect them again in the late afternoon, so the harbour has a busy middle and a lovely start and end.

Which islands work well together in one trip

The Dodecanese islands punish a trip that moves too often, because a holiday spent in transit is not much of a holiday. Two islands in a week is comfortable; three is possible if two of them are close. Here is the shape of trips that work, as examples rather than a formula.

That order is the part guests tend to notice afterwards, more than any single island:

“One thing we especially appreciated was how thoughtfully the trip flowed from one place to the next. It was not just about seeing beautiful locations, but about the overall experience and feeling each destination gave us along the way. The pacing, island order, and balance of everything felt so intentional and special.” Pamela A, TripAdvisor, May 2026

Seven days, first visit. Four nights Rhodes, three nights Symi. One flight, one short crossing, and two places that look nothing like each other. This is the trip we plan most often for people new to the region.

Ten days, slower. Three nights Rhodes, three nights Tilos, four nights Halki. The pace drops with each move, which is the right direction of travel. You end the holiday doing almost nothing.

Ten days, walking. Karpathos alone, with a car and a couple of base changes between the south and Olympos in the north. Splitting this across two islands wastes the walking days on boats.

Two weeks, no plan. Kalymnos, Leros, Lipsi and Patmos sit close together in the north of the group, so the distances between them are short. This is the one corner of the Dodecanese where moving frequently does not cost you much.

If you would rather have the shape of the trip worked out for you, that is what we do: see our tailor-made trips to Greece.

Which Dodecanese islands to leave off your list

Nobody writes this part, so here it is. Some Dodecanese islands are the wrong answer to some trips. None of them is bad. Knowing which one is wrong for you saves a wasted week.

Leave out Kasos and Kastellorizo if you have under ten days. Both are wonderful and both are awkward. Kastellorizo sits far east of the rest of the group, closer to Turkey than to Rhodes. Kasos has almost no visitor infrastructure. They are rewarding second or third visits, not first ones.

Leave out Astypalaia if you want to island-hop. It is beautiful and its hilltop town is one of the finest in the Aegean, but it sits apart from the others. Going there works as a single destination and fights you as part of a chain.

Leave out Rhodes town in August if you came for quiet. Not the island, the old town. Base yourself elsewhere on Rhodes and visit early.

Leave out Kalymnos if you do not climb. Its beaches are the weakest case in the group. Choose it for the cliffs or choose somewhere else.

Dodecanese or Cyclades?

Choose the Cyclades for a short trip with several islands in it, and the Dodecanese for a longer one with fewer. Most people weighing these up are privately comparing them with Santorini and Mykonos, so the two groups are worth putting side by side.

The short version: the Cyclades are easier to move around and harder to escape. The Dodecanese islands ask for more travelling time and give back more space when you get there.

There is one practical consequence. If you have five days and want three islands, the Cyclades will serve you better, and there is no shame in saying so. If you have ten days and want two islands you will remember, come here.

When to go

May, June, September and early October are the best months in the Dodecanese islands, and September is the strongest of the four. The sea has had all summer to warm up, the crowds have thinned, and the meltemi, which blows from about mid-May to mid-September, is behind it rather than ahead of it. Βy late September the meltemi has usually passed.

Winter in the Dodecanese islands is a real answer for some people and a bad one for most. The small islands largely close. Rhodes and Kos stay open and are pleasant to walk around, but you are visiting a town rather than taking a beach holiday.

Because the Dodecanese islands need more travel time than the Cyclades, the shoulder months matter more here than they do elsewhere in Greece. If you are weighing up quieter corners of the country more broadly, we have written about under-the-radar Greek destinations for spring. We have also covered where to go at short notice around 15 August, which is the week much of Greece is on the move at once.

Choosing your island

The Dodecanese islands reward a decision more than they reward a checklist. Pick the trip first: a first visit, a quiet week, a walking holiday, a set of photographs. The island then follows almost on its own.

If you are still holding a list of twelve, use the first table on this page and cut it to three. Then ask whether you can fly to any of them, because that answer usually chooses for you.

And if you would rather hand the whole question over, we plan tailor-made trips across Greece, including the islands most people never reach.

Frequently asked questions

What is the largest Dodecanese island?

Rhodes is the largest, both in land area and in population, and it has been the dominant island of the group since antiquity. It is also the main entry point, since its airport is one of only two international airports in the Dodecanese.

Why did Italy rule the Dodecanese?

Italy took the islands from the Ottoman Empire in 1912, during the Italo-Turkish War, and governed them until its surrender in September 1943. Germany then held the Dodecanese until the garrison commander surrendered them to the British on Rhodes on 8 May 1945. The islands stayed under British military administration until the 1947 peace treaty with Italy united them with Greece.

So the Italian period lasted about thirty-one years, not the thirty-five the end dates suggest. That is still long enough to explain the wide squares and neoclassical public buildings you see today.

What are the Dodecanese islands known for?

Three things above all: the medieval city of Rhodes, the monastery of Saint John on Patmos, and Italian-era architecture that sets the group apart from the rest of Greece. The islands are also known for being greener and less bleached than the Cyclades.

Do you need to hire a car?

On Halki, Symi, Tilos and Kastellorizo, no, and a car there is more nuisance than help: distances are short and parking is scarce. Rhodes and Kos sit in between, since buses run between the main towns and the beaches.

Is one week long enough for the Dodecanese?

One week is enough for two islands at a comfortable pace, and that is a good holiday. It is not enough to see the group, and trying to will leave you remembering ports rather than places. Ten days is where the region starts to open up.