What this page is, and what it is not
Every other guide on this site is written from the inside of the place it describes. This one is only partly that, and we would rather say so than pretend. We were on Rhodes from 27 July to 3 August 2022. The photographs divide almost perfectly in two: a week on the coast about eight kilometers south of town, and a single evening inside the Old Town — arriving just after half past four, leaving a little after nine, with dinner in the middle of it.
We did not get to Lindos. Not the village, not the acropolis above it — the thing most people would name first if you said Rhodes to them. We did not go inside the Palace of the Grand Master. So this page tells you about the walls, the harbor, the streets at dusk and what dinner cost, because that is what we can actually stand behind, and it is honest about the rest.
The Old Town — and it is a town, not a monument
This is the largest inhabited medieval town in Europe and a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the word that matters is inhabited. People live inside the walls. There are school runs and wheelie bins and scooters. It is not a preserved ruin you buy a ticket for.
- Walking into the Old Town is free. The gates are open, you walk through, and the walls, the lanes, the harbor and the squares cost nothing. Individual museums inside — the Palace among them — are ticketed separately.
- Go in the last two hours of daylight. Every photograph on this page that is worth anything was taken between about six and nine in the evening. The walls are honey-colored sandstone and they do something at sunset that they do not do at two in the afternoon, when they are simply glaring and hot.
- The harbor is the view. Fishing boats moored under the sea wall with the sun going down behind the battlements — that is the photograph at the top of this page and it is free to stand where it was taken.
The car problem, which nobody mentions
Look closely at some of the photographs on this page and you will see a traffic line. That is not an accident of framing — it is what the road that rings the walls is actually like on a summer evening, nose to tail, with the medieval fortifications on one side and a solid line of parked cars on the other.
- Do not try to drive to where you are going. Park once, outside the walls, and walk in through a gate. The Old Town's lanes are not for cars and the ring road is a parking lot with a line attached to it.
- Better still, do not have the car that evening at all. If you are staying down the coast, the bus and a taxi between them cost less than the hour you will spend looking for a space.
What dinner actually costs inside the walls
We photographed a taverna's board in the Old Town, in Greek, English and German. These are real prices from a real table on 1 August 2022 — four years ago now, so treat them as the shape of a bill rather than as today's bill:
- Greek salad €6.50, Cretan salad €7.00, tzatziki €4.50
- Grilled octopus €13.00, kalamari €12.00, prawns saganaki €11.50
- Stuffed vine leaves €6.00, giant beans €6.00, fries €3.90, bread and butter €1.00
The useful part is the ratio, and that does not date. Salads and the bean and vegetable dishes sit around a third of what the seafood costs, and a table that shares four or five of the cheaper plates eats better than a table that orders three grilled octopus. That is how the menu is designed to be read and most visitors do not read it that way.
The coast, honestly
The other sixty-odd photographs are a week on the resort strip south of town: pebble and coarse sand, sunbeds in rows, a big hotel block at the end of the bay, and sunsets that are genuinely as good as they look here.
- It is a good beach week and a completely ordinary one. Take the hotel block out of the frame and those photographs could be almost anywhere on the Mediterranean. That is not a complaint — it is what a resort is for — but it is not a reason to fly to Rhodes specifically.
- The beaches are pebble more often than sand. Bring something you can walk into the water in.
- Late July and early August is the hottest, busiest and most expensive window of the year. Those are our dates and we would not choose them again. May, June, September and early October are the same island with a bearable afternoon.
What we would do differently — which is the actual recommendation
Sleep in the Old Town, not down the coast. The single evening we spent inside the walls was the best thing on the whole trip, and we had to drive back out of it. Staying inside means the town after the day trippers and the cruise passengers have gone, which is a different place entirely — and it means the walls at sunset are a five-minute walk rather than a decision.
Then give Lindos a full day of its own, not an afternoon bolted onto a beach day. We cannot tell you what it is like from having been there, and we are not going to borrow someone else's description of it, but everything about how the island is laid out says it is the second anchor and we treated it as optional.
How long, and what it goes with
Two or three nights in the Old Town, plus however long you want on a beach. Rhodes is a week if you want a beach vacation with a remarkable town in it, or three nights if you want the town and nothing else. It is also a short hop to the Turkish coast and to the other Dodecanese islands, which is the trip we would build now and did not build then.
