Via Ferrata in Tinos with my sonThe longest via ferrata in the Cyclades — climbed in one unforgettable morning
A father-and-son day on the rock above Exomvourgo: cables, ladders, a wind that never stops, and the kind of view that makes a 9-year-old go very quiet for a minute.
📖 5 min read🗓️ June 2026📍 Tinos, Cyclades, Greece✍️ Tasos & George
I took my son George on the Via Ferrata in Tinos today. We've climbed indoors a lot. We've scrambled around on holiday rocks. But this was the first time we'd both clipped into a steel cable, helmets on, and looked up at a wall of granite knowing the only way down was up first.
It's the longest via ferrata in the Cyclades, running across the south face of Exomvourgo — the rocky cone in the middle of Tinos that you can see from almost anywhere on the island. We did it with Tinos Outdoor Activities, who organised everything — gear, briefing, guide, the whole thing — and made what could have been a stressful first-timer experience feel completely safe from minute one.
Who: Me and George (9). First via ferrata for both of us.
Difficulty: Kid-friendly with a guide. Comfortable scrambling helps. No fear of heights, please.
• • •
The approach. Gear checked, helmets on, harness double-checked by the guide. The wall above looks bigger every step closer.Last selfie at the base. Nobody is nervous yet. (Officially.)The little plaque on the rock — a quiet reminder that this route exists because people built it, bolt by bolt, into the mountain.
Clipping in
If you've never done a via ferrata before: it's basically a fixed-protection climbing route. A steel cable runs the length of the wall, anchored every few metres. You have two carabiners on a Y-shaped lanyard from your harness, and the rule is brutally simple — at least one carabiner is always clipped to the cable. When you reach an anchor, you move one clip past it, then the other. Never both off at the same time.
That's the entire safety system. It's also the thing a 9-year-old understands faster than most adults, because there is no abstraction in it. Click. Click. Move. Click. Click.
Looking up at George from below. From this angle you can see the cable, the rebar steps and the wall — and how small a child looks against all of it.The metal staples cut the steep sections into something a kid can actually do. One step, one clip, then the next.The steepest section we did. He paused here for about ten seconds, looked down once, said "okay" — and kept going.Rest point. The white villages in the distance are the inland Tinos hill towns — Volax, Falatados, Steni — strung along the ridge.
The view that stops you
There's a point about two-thirds of the way along where the wall opens up and you're suddenly above everything. The terraced fields, the white villages, the road we'd driven up that morning — all of it laid out below. Behind it, the Aegean. Beyond that, Mykonos, Syros, Delos, all of them sitting on the horizon like somebody had arranged them.
George stopped, hooked his arm through the cable, and just looked. He didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, "Dad. Dad." That was the whole sentence. I knew exactly what he meant.
That moment, mid-traverse, when you realise the sea is on one side and a thousand years of terraced hillside is on the other.The "Dad. Dad." moment. Mykonos and Syros somewhere on that horizon.Tucked into a niche in the rock: small clay offerings left by climbers. A reminder that Exomvourgo has been a sacred mountain on Tinos for longer than via ferratas have existed.
Why we'd do it again
I went into this thinking it would be a "cool dad day." It turned into something I genuinely didn't expect. Climbing with your kid is different from watching them play sport or doing a hike together. You're tied to the same cable. They see you make small judgement calls — when to wait, when to push, when to step back and let them figure out a foothold — and you see them do the same.
By the end of it George had stopped asking me what to do at every clip. He was just doing it. That's a small thing, and also not a small thing at all.
If you're on Tinos with a kid who's comfortable with heights and likes climbing — even just at an indoor wall — this is one of those days that pays back the planning a hundred times over. The crew at Tinos Outdoor Activities made it possible. Everything else, the mountain did on its own.
Top of the route. Sweaty hair, blue helmet, biggest grin I'd seen in a while.
Tell Famila.Travel where you're going, your dates and your kids' ages — it'll build an itinerary around your family, with the kind of days that actually become memories.
