What Is Kea Known For?

Kea holds an ancient stone lion whose origin story ties directly to a myth about wronged water nymphs, and the sculpture has watched over the island's capital for roughly 2,600 years.

Kea is known first for the Lion of Kea, carved from the island's native slate bedrock sometime around 600 BC and considered one of the oldest surviving works of Greek monumental sculpture. Measuring about eight meters long and three meters tall, the lion still carries the faint smile characteristic of Archaic Greek art, and locals know it affectionately as Liontas. According to legend, the gods sent the lion to punish the island after its population of water nymphs, and the beauty they brought to the land, drew divine jealousy, and residents eventually built a temple to smooth things over, with the lion left behind as a permanent reminder.

The island is equally known for its ancient political structure, since during the Archaic period Kea operated as a Tetrapolis, four separate, independent city-states, Ioulida, Korissia, Karthaia, and Poiessa, that shared a unified foreign policy despite governing themselves individually, a rare arrangement for an island this size.

Kea is also known among divers and maritime history enthusiasts for the wreck of the Britannic, sister ship to the Titanic, which sank off the island's coast in 1916 after hitting a mine during the First World War and now rests as one of the largest passenger ship wrecks in the world.

Beyond its history, Kea holds one of the last remaining oak forests in the Aegean, home to 16 of Greece's roughly 1,300 endemic plant species, giving the island a genuinely different landscape than the drier, whitewashed Cyclades most visitors expect.