Milos

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice . Milos has decided it’s done being the shy Cycladic cousin and has gone full main-character mode. Suddenly it’s everywhere: on your Instagram feed, in your friend’s “I’m thinking of going to Greece ” WhatsApp message, and splashed across glossy travel magazines that say things like “Milos is the island of the moment” in the same tone they once used for açai bowls and Aperol spritz. Honestly, the hype is well-deserved. Milos is what happens when someone takes Santorini, removes the cruise ship crowds, adds beaches that actually look like beaches and sprinkles in volcanic cliffs and lunar landscapes. It’s cinematic yet somehow still chilled; an island that feels both discovered and delightfully unbothered. Which brings me to Golden Milos Beach House, a hotel happily surfing the island’s new cool-kid status without trying to reinvent the wheel. No gimmicks, no €30 cocktails. Just a genuinely good-looking, freshly polished hotel that knows its real selling points: a knockout location and a beach so golden it seems like someone went wild with the saturation slider. Provatas Beach might just be the island’s most immediately “wow” setting and Golden Milos Beach House sits right on it. Bonus points for the fact that, unlike many Greek beaches, there are no dramatic cliffs to descend or awkward scrambles down dusty paths. It’s also blissfully close to civilisation: the port of Adamas is a breezy 15-minute drive away, and the airport is even closer. You get that “edge of the world” serenity without an actual odyssey to reach it, which my legs and suitcase both appreciated. The hotel is slightly remote, though, so a car or quad is non-negotiable if you want to see more than your sunbed. And you should, because Firiplaka and Tsigrado, two of Milos’s superstar beaches, are within easy reach. Not that we rushed. On day one we made big, ambitious plans to explore. By day two those plans were sitting in the glove compartment while we rotated lazily between sea and pool like well-hydrated seals. For a relatively small hotel, Golden Milos Beach House is impressively stacked. There are three pools — one main pool with a wooden deck and loungers, an upper pool that feels like a retreat within a retreat, and a smaller plunge-style option that’s perfect when you just need to reset your core temperature before another iced coffee. And then there’s the beach. The Salty Goat Beach Club manages the organised section, with neat rows of sunbeds and umbrellas and service right to your lounger. I became deeply committed to this lifestyle: iced coffees in the morning, spritzes in the afternoon, fresh fruit when I remembered I should probably eat something that wasn’t liquid. There’s also a Wellness Garden where they do yoga at sunrise and sunset, plus massages and treatments in billowy cabanas that look like they were designed specifically for Instagram. On certain nights they do silent-disco parties on the beach and open-air cinema screenings. True to Milos form, there are no malls, no designer boutiques and no thumping nightclubs. Thank God. You can spend your entire time rotating between bed, pool and beach and I fully support that lifestyle choice but Milos rewards a bit of exploration. From Provatas, you’re close to some of the island’s most theatrical beaches: Firiplaka with its red-and-white cliffs, Tsigrado with its slightly chaotic rope-and-ladder descent and the old sulphur mines for a dose of weird lunar history. And then, of course, there’s Sarakiniko, the island’s iconic moon beach. It is, quite frankly, unlike any beach I’ve ever been to — a chalk-white, otherworldly landscape that looks more like a movie set than the real world. Day trips by boat around the island are practically mandatory, if only to see Kleftiko, a stunning beach that is only accessible by boat. But heed my strong recommendation and rent a self-drive boat ins