Giardini Naxos: Sicily's First Greek Colony Is Also Its Best-Value Beach Town

Everyone comes to this stretch of coast for Taormina, perched dramatically on its hill. Fewer people realize that the flat beach town at the bottom of that hill has the older and, in a specific sense, more important claim: Giardini Naxos was founded in 734 BC, the very first Greek colony anywhere in Sicily — before Syracuse, before Selinunte, before any of the island’s other famous Greek sites. It’s also, unsurprisingly, a noticeably cheaper place to base yourself than Taormina itself, five minutes back up the coast road.

Sicily’s first Greek colony

The Greek colonists who founded Naxos in 734 BC picked this spot for the same reason everyone still comes here now: a natural harbor with easy landing on a long sandy shore, right at the base of a defensible headland. It predates Syracuse by a year and served as the springboard for several other Greek settlements founded later across Sicily — which makes this unassuming beach town, historically, the actual starting point for Greek Sicily, not the more famous sites that came after it.

The archaeological park: what’s actually left

Don’t expect the standing columns of Agrigento or Segesta — Naxos’s ruins are lower-key: sections of the original lava-stone city walls, temple foundations, and the genuinely interesting remains of ancient pottery kilns, since Naxos was a working ceramics center in antiquity as much as a religious one. The small on-site museum fills in the context the ruins alone don’t give you. The park is open daily, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, with tickets at €5 for adults and €2.50 for EU citizens aged 18-25 — a fraction of what you’d pay at Sicily’s bigger-name sites, and usually without the crowds either.

The beach: Taormina’s coastline, without Taormina’s prices

Giardini Naxos’s beach is long, gold-sand, and lined with the classic Sicilian lido setup — rows of striped umbrellas and sunbeds, with a free public stretch (spiaggia libera) alongside the paid lidos if you’d rather not rent a spot. The water and the view are effectively the same coastline Taormina is famous for, just accessed from sea level instead of from a hilltop terrace, and accommodation here runs noticeably cheaper than up in Taormina proper — which is exactly why plenty of people who visit Taormina daily actually sleep down here. For the view most people only get from a restaurant terrace, this boat tour leaves right from the harbor here and swings past Isola Bella and the coves below Taormina (affiliate link — booking through it costs you nothing extra and helps support this site).

Getting there from Taormina

The bus is genuinely the easiest option: Interbus and Etna Trasporti both run the route between Taormina and Giardini Naxos constantly throughout the day, the ride takes about 18 minutes, and a ticket runs €2-3, bought directly from the driver. There’s no real need for a rental car just to move between the two — save the car for the day trips further afield.

Pair it with Castelmola and Taormina

If you’re staying in Giardini Naxos, the natural day plan is to go up rather than further along the coast: Taormina for the Teatro Antico and Corso Umberto, then Castelmola higher still for the best view on this whole stretch of coast. Three very different elevations, one bus ticket and one funicular/cable-car ride apart.

Practical tips

• Visit the archaeological park in the morning — there’s little shade among the ruins, and it gets genuinely hot by midday in summer.
• Save the beach for the afternoon, once the sun has moved and the water’s had time to warm up.
• Stay here instead of Taormina if budget matters — the 18-minute bus ride is a small price for noticeably lower accommodation costs.
• Buy your bus ticket from the driver — no app or advance purchase needed for this short a hop.

My honest verdict

Giardini Naxos will never out-photograph Taormina — nobody’s putting this beach town on a postcard the way they do the Teatro Antico’s view of Etna. But as a place to actually stay, eat, and use as a base while still seeing everything Taormina offers a bus ride away, it’s a genuinely smart pick, with a real historical claim of its own most visitors never even hear about.

More on the area in the Taormina region guide, and see Giardini Naxos on our interactive Sicily map.