Alonissos & the Peristera Wreck

A day here is built around one boat trip. Operators run from Patitiri and the smaller harbours on Alonissos, cross to Peristera for the museum dive, then move to a sheltered reef such as Agios Petros for the second tank. The wreck dive is guided throughout, booked ahead and run to a fixed plan on a protected archaeological site, so there is no wandering off on your own and nothing is touched or lifted.

The wreck reads as a cargo field rather than a ship. What you swim over is the load itself: thousands of amphorae from a fifth-century BC merchantman, still stacked in the rows they were stowed in and spilling down a mound between 22 and 28 m. With 20 to 40 m of visibility you take in the whole spread on the descent, then work along it slowly. It is a looking dive rather than a swimming one, and at that depth the bottom time goes quickly.

The rest of the park is quiet, low-traffic rock diving: reef slopes, short walls and small caverns, with ancient pottery scattered in shallow bays like Kokkinokastro. The water is clear and the current mild, so the difficulty sits in the depth and the certification bar rather than in the conditions. It suits divers with Advanced or around thirty logged dives who come for the archaeology and the protected setting, and who can work around a short, weather-dependent season.