Symi's harbour holds roughly 2,500 residents today; in the 1880s it held closer to 22,500, and the island launched more sponge-diving boats than any port in the Aegean. That wealth is still legible in the architecture. Merchant families built tiers of neoclassical houses up the amphitheatre slopes of Gialos and Chorio, painting them in ochre, terracotta and Symi blue under strict preservation orders that survive to this day. Shipyards at Pedi and Harani turned out kaïki hulls for the whole Dodecanese. When rubber diving suits and, later, a sponge blight collapsed the trade, the population emptied toward Rhodes, Athens and Florida. The houses remained. What visitors now photograph from the deck of a rhodes cruise to symi & st george's bay with hotel transfer is essentially a nineteenth-century commercial town preserved by economic misfortune rather than by design. The island's second landmark is geological. St George's Bay — Agios Georgios Dysalonas on Greek charts — sits on the eastern coast beneath a limestone wall that rises some 300 metres straight from the water. The cliff is the tallest of its kind in the Dodecanese and shades the pebble beach for much of the afternoon. The name recalls a chapel and, according to island tradition, the sheer difficulty of reaching the place at all; "Dysalonas" carries the sense of hard passage. There is no road. Entry costs 0 EUR, and access is by boat only, which is why every Symi Island & St George's Bay boat excursion in circulation ends at the same anchorage. Inland, the Monastery of Panormitis anchors the island's religious life, its bell tower and pebble-mosaic courtyard drawing pilgrims from across Greece to the Archangel Michael. Chorio holds the Archaeological and Folklore Museum and the Kastro, built by the Knights of St John on older Byzantine foundations. Roughly 500 stone steps of the Kali Strata climb from the port to the upper village, a route walked daily for four centuries. Symi's modern significance is partly juridical: the German surrender of the Dodecanese was signed here on 8 May 1945, in a house on the waterfront. The islands passed to Greece three years later. Today Symi Island speedboat adventures and slower day cruises carry the bulk of arrivals, most on a single-day rhodes cruise to symi & st george's bay with hotel transfer that departs Rhodes at first light and returns before dusk — a rhythm that leaves the island quiet again by evening, as it has been since the sponge fleets stopped sailing.