How many Greek islands are inhabited?

The census count usually quoted is about 227, but it includes islets with one or two residents. 89 are islands you can genuinely travel to and stay on; even among those, 15 have fewer than a hundred residents.

Has anyone visited every Greek island?

Visiting all 89 main islands is genuinely hard — several see one ferry a week — but it is finite and people are working on it. Visiting all 874 named rocks is not something anyone will ever do, which is why Pelagos scores them as a separate joke tier.

Greek islands

How many islands does Greece have?

Q: How many islands does Greece have?

It depends what counts as an island. Roughly 6,000 if you count every rock; 1,728 pieces of land of at least 1,000 m² in the government’s open geodata; 874 islets with recorded names; about 227 inhabited at the last count; and 89 islands a traveller can actually visit and stay on — the list Pelagos tracks.

Ask five sources and you get five confident, wildly different numbers. None of them is wrong — each one is answering a different question. Here is the whole ladder, from the biggest number to the only one you can actually finish.

~6,000
The brochure number. It appears everywhere from tourism campaigns to pub quizzes, and it counts every rock, reef and skerry that breaks the surface of Greek waters. Nobody can list them; that is rather the point of the number.
1,728
What you get when you stop estimating and actually count. We extracted every piece of land of at least 1,000 m² from the Greek government’s open coastline data for Pelagos’s offline map: 112 islands people travel to, and 1,616 islets and rocks beyond them. Below 1,000 m² it stops being cartography and starts being tide-dependent.
874
The ones with a name. Of all those islets and rocks, 874 have a name somebody bothered to record in OpenStreetMap — Greece has ten rocks called Agios Georgios alone. Pelagos lists every one of them in a tongue-in-cheek "cartographer mode". Nobody will ever finish it.
227
The inhabited count usually quoted from the census. Honest, but it includes islets whose population is a lighthouse keeper or two monks, and it moves between censuses as tiny islands empty and refill.
112
Islands worth a trip. 89 islands you can travel to and stay on, plus 23 legendary excursion islets — Delos, Spinalonga, Ro — that you visit for an afternoon. That split matters: an afternoon on Delos is not the same claim as a week on Ikaria, so Pelagos scores the two tiers separately.
89
The number that is actually countable — and finishable. The inhabited Greek islands a traveller can genuinely get to: from Crete (population 624,408) down to Marathi, population 5 — and 15 of the 89 have fewer than a hundred people. This is the checklist Pelagos keeps score against, and nobody we know has finished it.

We know these numbers because we had to draw them: Pelagos’s map is built from the open data itself, bundled offline, with no tile service behind it. Every threshold above is a line somebody had to choose — which is the honest answer to the question. The full list of the 89 is here, region by region.

So — how many of the 89 have you been to?
Most people guess wrong by three or four. Tick them off on the map and find out. Free, in your browser.

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How many islands does Greece have?

The regions