We're closing out a month-long trip through Malta, Crete, and Rhodes, and Rhodes turned out to be the island where the history is so dense it's almost unfair to the other two. Malta gave us 7,000 years in 316 square kilometers. Rhodes gives you a single fortified Old Town where Hellenistic streets, a Crusader hospital, an Ottoman mosque, and a Mussolini-era palace all occupy the same few blocks, and somehow none of it feels like a stage set.
Five nights was the right amount of time. We stayed at the Sheraton Rhodes Resort in Ixia, about 15 minutes and 15 euros by taxi from the Old Town. It's a big property with plenty of kids around, but unlike the Amirandes on Crete, the adult spaces, bars and pools, stayed genuinely adult. Breakfast was an expansive buffet, though a notch below the Phoenicia in Malta or Domes Noruz in Crete (no smoked salmon, for those keeping score). Rooms were comfortable and quiet. Overall it landed as a solid four-star experience rather than a true five, and next time we'd probably look for something smaller and more boutique. The Bonvoy points made the math easy, and our usual Amex Fine Hotels and Resorts booking wasn't available on this last-minute trip at the start of high season.
Old town, old laundry
The Old Town is the largest inhabited medieval town in Europe, and it earns the description on first walk. We'd put it roughly tied with Chania for feel, though Rhodes is larger and, unlike Chania, walled in tight enough that you lose the harbor view. Still not Dubrovnik, which remains our standard for this kind of place, but close. We ate there four times across the visit, twice for lunch and twice for dinner, and never tired of the shops, bars, and cafes packed into the lanes.
Just outside the walls sits the New Town, with a genuinely high-end shopping district and one of the better vegetarian restaurants we've found anywhere: Ono. We went twice. We make a habit of hunting down strong vegetarian and vegan kitchens wherever we travel; in Chania it was Pulse, which never clicked for us the way Ono did here.
One more Old Town discovery worth a permanent place in the travel notes: a small, owner-run laundromat tucked into the medieval lanes, run by an older man and presumably his wife. Drop off a load, go explore or have lunch, come back two hours later to perfectly folded laundry. Nine euros fifty per load, a fraction of what hotel laundry service costs, and somehow more satisfying than it has any right to be.
Lindos before the ships land
Lindos is an hour south by car service, and we skipped renting a car entirely; parking near the village is brutal even early in the morning, and a driver solved that problem before it started. The advice everywhere is to arrive by 9am, and it's correct. The climb up to the Acropolis is steep, but the Doric temple perched 116 meters above the sea, with the Knights' fortifications wrapped around it and St. Paul's Bay below, is worth every step. We wandered the whitewashed village afterward, grabbed a bite, and headed back before the cruise crowds fully arrived.
Symi, the trip's best surprise
We'd planned on the Valley of the Butterflies, but learned that late June is too early in the season for any meaningful number of moths to have arrived, so we swapped it for a fast ferry to Symi instead. Best decision of the trip. The ferry left from Rhodes port, with hotel-to-port bus transport included, and we took an early departure, a pattern we kept all week, to beat the crowds.
Symi's harbor town, Gialos, is one of the most striking waterfronts in the Aegean: tiers of ochre and rust neoclassical houses stacked up a steep hillside. We climbed the roughly 500 steps up to Chorio for the views, again best done early before the heat sets in, then wandered the harbor for lunch among a dozen good options. On the way back, the boat stopped at a bay accessible only by water for a 30-minute swim in water clear enough to second-guess whether it was real. It sounds like a lot of fuss for a brief dip. It isn't. You'll wish you'd stayed longer.
Logistics, receipts, and the absence of Bolt
We mostly skipped the Sheraton's restaurants in favor of local tavernas, walking when we could and taking a taxi into town otherwise. Taxis in Rhodes are fast and efficient, if not cheap, and worth it to sidestep parking entirely. What we missed was the convenience of Uber or Bolt, both readily available on Malta but blocked in most of Greece by the taxi union.
Two practical notes for anyone following this itinerary. Greeks love a paper receipt, for everything, sometimes more than one per transaction; by evening I was regularly emptying my pockets of small slips of paper. And Amex is accepted almost nowhere outside the larger hotels, so make sure a Visa, Mastercard, or a phone wallet not tied to Amex is working before you land.
We flew out in the evening on departure day, which meant a late checkout and one last relaxed morning at the resort, the same rhythm we'd settled into across all three islands by then. Malta surprised us, Crete demanded more time than we gave it, and Rhodes managed to be both the most historically layered stop and the one with the best unplanned afternoon, a 30-minute swim in a bay we almost didn't bother visiting.