Σπήλαια στη Σαντορίνη

Santorini Cave Houses

photography — A house partly underground, partly above ground, Santorini, Greece. Public Domain.

Σπήλαια στη Σαντορίνη (Santorini Cave Houses) is not a site, actually this page it is a general description of dozens of sites. All those sites are underground passages and rooms which were used for living, storing goods, and as wine cellars. The cave houses are called υπόσκαφα (yposkafa), the greek word for artificial caves. Literally it translates to “dug into a rock”. The wine cellars are called κάναβα (kanava or canava), the term is commonly used on Santorini island, but also in the rest of Greece.

The traditional yposkafa usually consisted of a single room. The cooking place as well as the toilet were outside the house. The cooking place was normally open air and quite simple, two stones with a cooking cauldron, between the stones the fire was lighted. The toilet was a small building, and it was raised, so it was necessary to climb some steps. The reason was simply that there was a slurry pit where the sewage was collected, at certain times it was transported to the fields and used as fertilizer. Every house had a cistern, which was the only source of water. The rain which fell on the yard in front of the house was collected in the cistern. Due to the very dry climate, it was not much.

Santorini is a stratovolcano, the eruptions threw the lava into the air, which produced fine particles which solidified and rained down. The result was a cone consisting of volcanic tufa or tuff, a rock which is porous and rather soft. And it is rather elastic, which means it does not easily break in the frequent earthquakes, as a result, the caves were much more resistant to earthquakes than normal houses.

Long ago the volcano exploded, and the island was completely destroyed, only a small part of the volcano, which forms a crescent-shaped rim, still exists. This is the island Santorini. On the opposite site an even smaller fragment remained, the island Thirasia. The inner part collapsed and formed a huge bowl, which is called a caldera in geology. In this case, as it was below sea level, it immediately filled with seawater. Then the volcano produced more lava, new eruptions, and a new stratovolcano grew at the same place. This is the small island Nea Kameni in the center of the caldera.

When the people resettled the island, they started at the outside, which was rather flat. The slopes climb gently until the edge of the Caldera is reached. The other side is very steep, and to save land for agriculture, the people built the houses on the other side in the steep part. They built staircase downhill, and then dug cave houses into the rather soft tufa. This had numerous advantages: less work than building a house, moderate temperature inside all year, less damage by earthquakes, and a great view.

Using valuable agricultural ground for building houses is not only stupid, it is also a matter of wealth. In other words, the cave houses were once the homes of the poor and the crew members of ships who were unable to build their houses on the top of the caldera and therefore had to look for something else. So while cave houses were rather cheap, they had also a low social status.

Today the island is quite popular with tourists, and as the outside is similar to all other islands, but the inside is quite spectacular, all the cruise ships land on the inside, the caldera side. A steep path leads up in serpentines, and there is also a cable car. The villages on top of the rim, especially Megalochori, have many cave houses. During the last decades, so many cave houses were converted into guest houses, it's completely impossible to list them all. They dug new ones, and they even dug old ones new aka faked them. We recommend to search booking.com for more info. Our guess is there are at least 25 guesthouses in cave houses on the island and almost 10 wineries. Our hope is we have a representative subset of them.