Rhodes by car: the route most visitors miss

Rhodes is eighty kilometres long and forty wide. By Greek island standards, that is enormous: many entire islands fit within its area. And yet the vast majority of visitors who arrive on Rhodes spend all their time between the Old Town — which deserves that attention — and the resort hotels along the east coast between Faliraki and Ixia, which deserve none. The island’s interior, the medieval villages of the centre, the rugged and less developed west coast: all of this remains for those who hire a car and have some curiosity.

Car rental in Rhodes Town runs between €25 and €45 per day depending on the season, and it completely changes what is possible. It is not a luxury: it is the difference between one island and half an island.

The east coast and Lindos

The road running down the east coast from Rhodes Town to Cape Prasonisi at the southern tip is the most tourist-developed stretch on the island. The all-inclusive resorts cluster between kilometres ten and forty, and the landscape is pleasant without being extraordinary. What is worth stopping for along this corridor is Lindos, forty-seven kilometres from the city.

Lindos has two layers visible from the road: the white village, with its whitewashed houses climbing the slope, and the acropolis high above, ringed by medieval walls. The village is genuinely attractive — cobbled streets, courtyards with black-and-white pebble mosaics, shops no worse than in other Aegean tourist villages — but in July and August it receives the daily buses from cruise ships anchored offshore, and foot traffic approaches the unsustainable.

The solution is arriving before nine in the morning or after five in the afternoon, when the cruise passengers have returned to their ships and the village recovers a human scale. The acropolis, with its third-century BC Doric temple and fourteenth-century Knights’ walls, has from the top a view over Lindos’s double bay — one of the island’s few natural harbours — that is the finest on Rhodes outside the Old Town. If you go at sunrise, the site is essentially yours.

The interior: butterflies, wine and altitude

From Lindos, instead of returning along the coast, the interesting route cuts inland westward. The road climbing through Laerma toward Siana and Monolithos passes through a completely different landscape: pine forests, hills, stone villages with a few hundred inhabitants each.

The Butterfly Valley — Petaloudes — is in the northern interior, around twenty-five kilometres from the city. Technically what you see are not butterflies but moths: the species Panaxia quadripunctaria, which congregates in this green, humid gorge in July and August in numbers ranging from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand individuals. The specimens rest with wings closed on the rocks and trees, camouflaged by their brown markings; when they take flight they flash a vivid red. The gorge has a two-kilometre wooden walkway. The visit has one rule: no noise, no shaking of bushes, no causing the insects to fly — they exhaust their entire energy reserve in flight and do not feed during this phase of their cycle.

Embonas, the wine village of the mountain on the slopes of Mount Attavyros (Rhodes’s highest point at 1,215 metres), is the best place on the island to understand that Rhodes has an agricultural interior culture that has nothing to do with beach tourism. The CAIR winery produces Cava Rodos and other wines for export; the smaller family winery Emery makes wines found only on the island. In August, the village squares have the atmosphere of a place that has not decided to orient itself toward tourism — which is precisely its appeal.

Monolithos and the far southwest

The castle of Monolithos is in the island’s far southwest, eighty kilometres from Rhodes Town. It stands on a 236-metre rock rising perpendicular above the sea. The Knights of St John built it in 1476 on a formation that already had defensive significance. Today only the enclosure walls and a small chapel remain, but the ascent on the stairs cut into the rock and the view over the sea in three directions fully justify the distance from the city.

The west coast of Rhodes, less visited than the east, has beaches more exposed to wind and with greater swell. This makes it less suitable for sunlounger tourism, but explains its popularity with windsurfers. Prasonisi, at the southern tip where the island ends in a sand spit, is one of the best windsurfing spots in the Mediterranean: north and south winds converge precisely at that point, and in summer blow with an almost industrial regularity.

The Feraklos castle

Returning toward the city along the east coast, Feraklos castle deserves a stop on the outskirts of Charaki. It is the northernmost fortress in the defensive line the Knights built along the coast, and the last they surrendered to the Ottomans in 1522 — months after Rhodes Town had already fallen. Today it is in ruins, but the walls on their headland above the sea have a scale that makes them interesting, and the fact that almost nobody goes there — the car park holds five vehicles and is generally empty — gives it a quiet that the island’s more famous sites have long since lost.

The complete Far Guides Greece guide includes detailed routes across the mainland and islands, interactive maps and all the practical information you need to plan your independent trip.