Santorini When She’s Alone

Published: 12 August 2026

There’s a line a local musicologist once gave Maria Petrenko about Oia that has stayed with her ever since. You don’t go to a woman when everyone in the room is queuing up to light her cigarette. You go when she’s alone.

That’s Santorini in December. Same caldera, same whitewashed alleyways, same view that launched a million photographs, but with nobody in it except you. Maria is a local guide and the founder of Santorini by Maria, running private walking tours built around slow travel, and she lives on the island year-round. In this episode she takes Imogen Strickland through the version of Santorini that most visitors never see, and makes a quietly persuasive case for going once everyone has gone home.

She talks about the empty alleyways after the first rains, when the herbs come back and the mushrooms appear on the mountain if you’re brave enough to pick them. She explains why hiking the volcano is better in the cold, when you can feel the heat coming up through the rock instead of being confused by the sun beating down on you. She describes February fog creeping into the villages and admits it’s ideal weather for anyone with a Gothic novel in them. There’s the arnaki, the slow-roasted lamb that tastes better the following day, and the chilly evenings that push you indoors to your own oven with a glass of wine and no reason to hurry.

Maria is honest about the trade-offs too. Most locals leave for the winter, and the ones who stay do so for a reason. The wind is the real cold, not the temperature. Some villages will leave you with nowhere to eat, so she recommends basing yourself in Oia or Fira, the two places that become unbearable in July and are perfectly pleasant in December. Public transport thins out. Museums keep short hours.

What you get in return is the thing everyone comes to Santorini looking for and almost never finds. Space. Maria calls it island-wide me time. There’s also a creative community quietly reassembling itself on the island, painters in residence, writers taking rooms for a month, galleries opening in the inland villages, drawing on an artistic history that goes back to the frescoes at Akrotiri and got lost somewhere in the rush of mass tourism.

If you’ve been putting Santorini off because of what you’ve seen in other people’s photographs, this is the conversation that might change your mind about when to go.

Find Maria’s private walking tours at ⁠Santorini by Maria⁠.

More low season inspiration, destination guides and our full Low Season Traveller Calendar: ⁠lowseasontraveller.com⁠