These Party Islands in Greece Want to Change Their Image

It was around the time that the ferry eased itself into the port of Ios, an island in the Greek Cyclades, that I began to wonder if we had come to the right place. We — my husband and I, elder millennials on the cusp of middle age — were shoulder to shoulder with teenagers, hordes of them, youthful energy bounding off their dewy skin. In the thick of summer, the ferry’s windowless boarding area felt like a furnace. I felt a wave of claustrophobia. These kids had come to party. We had … not. We sought good food, local wine, to somehow come home healthier than when we left, like the people who go to Paris and return 10 pounds lighter, “because of all the walking” and the unprocessed bread.

To paraphrase a popular meme: Could the island do both?

For sure, there’s plenty of respite to be found within Ios’s 42 square miles. Goats still roam the island’s craggy hills and cliffs. It lacks an airport. But, since the 1970s, Ios has been known, primarily, for one thing.

“It’s a place to party,” said Katerina Katopis-Lykiardopulo, a photographer who collaborated with the author Chrysanthos Panas on “Greek Islands,” a coffee-table book published in May.

“Back in the day, there were hippies, there were drugs, there were people sleeping on the beach.” Ms. Katopis-Lykiardopulo said. “Is it still a party island? Do teenagers still come? Yes, of course. But the island is making an effort to be more than that.”

Aware that not every visitor wants to rage until dawn or cross off points of interest with their fellow cruise ship passengers, intrepid operators on Ios, as well as its world famous Cycladic neighbors to the north and south, Mykonos and Santorini, are inviting tourists to put up their feet and lean into a version of wellness that hinges on slowing down.

Case in point: Calilo, a 3-year-old resort on the east coast of Ios, enough hairpin turns over the hills and away from the port to (almost) banish the memory of a billboard advertising a nightclub named Scorpion (“Don’t leave until you get stung”). A Disneyland for the spiritually optimistic, Calilo pushes motivational mantras instead of five-for-one shot specials.

“When we enter this place, we leave everything negative behind,” said Sandy Parisi, a Calilo concierge with a disposition to rival the midafternoon sun, leading us through a breezeway with shapes strategically cut out of its roof: when the light hits right, hearts spray out across the path.

In the white stone…