Gabriella Vasquez ’27

I spent my Spring semester studying abroad in Greece through the CYA Athens program.  I applied for an Intercultural Enrichment Stipend to support a research-oriented intercultural field excursion to the Aegean Island of Milos. This experience was valuable to my academic research, which is deeply invested in understanding how tourism transforms island environments and social life. I was able to develop a new understanding through a Greek lens grounded in local narratives and lived realities.

First Impressions of the Island

When I arrived in Milos, I already knew it would be beautiful. I had seen the same images many travelers see before coming to the Greek islands: white rock, blue water, small houses near the sea. What I did not expect was how quickly the island would feel quieter and more personal than those images suggested. 

I stayed in an Airbnb that had been converted from an old fisherman’s house. My host picked me up from the port, gave me a map, and left local bread and jam. These were small details, but they shaped the way I entered the island. Milos did not feel, at least at first, like a place built entirely around visitors. It felt like a place where tourism had arrived alongside older ways of living. 

That feeling stayed with me throughout the trip. There were tourist areas, especially near the port and major beaches, but the island did not feel overwhelmingly commercialized. I did not see the kind of chain-store development that often makes different places start to look the same.

Much of Milos still felt shaped by its roads, villages, cliffs, and sea. It was beautiful, but not in a polished or manufactured way. 

Landscape and Movement

Sarakiniko made that especially clear. The white volcanic rock is what makes the beach famous, but what struck me most was the way people had to move through it. There were not many signs, railings, or built paths. People walked carefully across the rock, followed its curves, and gathered where the landscape allowed them to. The place directed movement more than any infrastructure did. 

That made Sarakiniko feel different from places where tourism has completely reorganized the environment. People came to take pictures and swim, but they still had to adjust to the island. The rock was uneven, the sun was strong, and the paths were not always obvious. There was something powerful about that. The landscape had not been fully softened for visitors. 

Driving around Milos gave me the same impression. There were long stretches where the island felt open and quiet, with small roads cutting through dry hills and sudden views of the water. I kept noticing how much of the island existed outside the scenes people usually photograph. The beauty was real, but it was not the whole story. It belonged to a place where people lived, worked, left, returned, and remembered. 

History and Local Life

The Catacombs of Milos added another layer to this. Visiting them reminded me that the island’s history extends far beyond its beaches. The catacombs were quiet and underground, connected to early Christian life and burial practices. They made Milos feel older and more complex than the version of the island that appears in travel photos. 

But the moment I have thought about it most happened in a jewelry shop. A young woman working there asked me what I was doing in Greece. When I told her I was studying in Athens, she became excited and told me she was going there for university in the fall. She had never been to the mainland before. 

For me, Athens had become part of daily life during my semester abroad. It was busy, crowded, and familiar in a way. But for her, Athens seemed almost far away, not just geographically but emotionally. She imagined it as fast, overwhelming, and different from the life she knew in Milos. I remember being struck by that reversal. I had come to Milos as someone leaving the mainland for an island. She was preparing to leave the island for the mainland. 

That conversation stayed with me because it made the island feel less like a destination and more like a home. It reminded me that the Greek islands are not only places people visit to escape. They are also places people grow up in, feel proud of, feel limited by, and carry with them when they leave. 

Seeing Milos More Fully

By the end of my time in Milos, I still saw the island’s beauty, but I understood it differently. The beaches and views were memorable, but they were not what stayed with me most. What stayed with me were the smaller signs of life around them: the fisherman’s house turned into a guest space, the bread and jam left by my host, the old catacombs beneath the island, the quiet roads, and the young woman imagining her first move to Athens. 

Milos made me think about how easily visitors can mistake beauty for simplicity. A place can be breathtaking and still have tensions, histories, routines, and futures that are not immediately visible. Tourism often teaches us to look at places quickly, to collect the most beautiful parts and move on. Milos asked for slower attention. 

What I learned there was not that the island was untouched or separate from tourism. It clearly was not. But it had not disappeared into tourism either. It remained a place with its own rhythm, shaped by people who were proud of where they came from and by a landscape that still seemed to resist being fully remade for outsiders. 

Milos stayed with me because it complicated the image I arrived with. I came expecting beauty, and I found it. But I also found a place that felt lived in, deeply loved, and more difficult to summarize than any photograph could show.