In the 1890s, roughly 22,000 people lived on Symi, an island of 58 square kilometres with little arable land and no river. Their wealth came from sponge diving and shipbuilding. Symiot divers worked the seabed off North Africa with the skandalopetra, a flat weighted stone, while the island's boatyards supplied caiques and trading schooners to fleets across the eastern Mediterranean. That money built the amphitheatre of neoclassical mansions still stacked above Gialos harbour: ochre, indigo and faded rose facades, pedimented windows, tiled roofs, courtyards paved in black and white pebble. When rubber suits and synthetic sponges ended the trade, the island emptied. Fewer than 2,500 people live there today. Symi has no airport, and the harbour remains the island's front door. A Rhodes to Symi Sunset Cruise therefore repeats a crossing that shaped the place for two centuries — roughly 24 nautical miles of open Aegean between Mandraki Harbour and Gialos, along the eastern flank of Rhodes with the Turkish coast on the horizon. A preservation order imposed in the 1970s froze the settlement's appearance and barred concrete construction in the two villages. The result is one of the few Dodecanese ports where a nineteenth-century skyline survives whole, unbroken by later building. Rhodes to Symi Sunset Cruise tickets buy passage rather than admission; the island itself charges 0 EUR, and its quays, staircases and churches are open ground. Above Gialos, the Kali Strata staircase climbs to Chorio, the older upper village, where a Byzantine castle sits on the ancient acropolis and the Knights of St John left their walls and coats of arms. The waterfront clock tower dates from 1881. At the southern tip stands the monastery of Panormitis, dedicated to the Archangel Michael, its courtyard laid in pebble mosaic, its baroque bell tower a landmark for sailors approaching from the south. Symi island boat trips also trace the eastern shore, past Agios Georgios Disalonas, a bay sealed by a limestone wall of some 300 metres — among the tallest sea cliffs in the Aegean. Rhodes to Symi Sunset Cruise tours arrive when the effect is architectural rather than merely atmospheric. Gialos is a bowl, and the mansions face inward across it, so the last light travels along the facades in sequence, tier by tier, before the ridge cuts it off. The harbour was designed to be seen from the water. Evening sailings from Rhodes reach it at precisely that hour.