Long before tourism, Alonnisos lived on its vineyards. Mixed farming covered the slopes, alongside almonds, figs, and olives, and the island's wine was prized enough to be exported in antiquity. That world ended in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when phylloxera, the root-feeding aphid that devastated vineyards across Europe, reached the Aegean and destroyed Alonnisos's vines. An island that had defined itself by its wine suddenly had to find another livelihood. The terraces remained, the pines crept back, and the islanders turned increasingly to the sea. The agriculture that survives today is a quieter, mixed affair, a memory of a more prosperous monoculture that the insect erased.

For most of its history, life on Alonnisos was concentrated in the hilltop capital, a tight cluster of stone houses behind a small fortress that had once guarded against pirates and raiders. Then, in 1965, an earthquake tore through the island. The old village, Chora, was so badly damaged that the state declared it unsafe and resettled the population down by the coast. Many islanders never returned to the heights. Instead they rebuilt their lives at Patitiri, the port in the southeast, which grew almost overnight from a landing into the island's main town. For decades the old village stood half-abandoned, its empty houses slowly weathering above a community that had moved on without it.

Chora, the place locals still call simply the village and signpost as the Old Village, did not stay a ruin. Over recent decades its stone houses have been carefully restored, many of them now serving the very tourism that once seemed to threaten the island's character. Walk its narrow lanes today and you find a settlement that has lived three lives: medieval refuge behind a fortress wall, casualty of a single afternoon's earthquake, and finally a preserved hilltop village that draws visitors precisely because it survived. The fortress is gone to time, but the dense, defensive logic of the streets remains, a town built to be hard for strangers to navigate.

The sea around Alonnisos is in unusually good ecological condition, and the island has staked its modern identity on protecting it. In 1992 the waters became the Alonnisos Marine Park, established above all to shelter the Mediterranean monk seal, Monachus monachus, one of the rarest marine mammals in the world. For years the island's unofficial mascot was a monk seal named Kostis, raised at a rescue center after being found as an orphaned pup. In July 2021 Kostis was killed, apparently by a spearfisher, and the death drew condemnation across Greece. It was a reminder of how fragile the recovery is. The seals have begun, slowly, to return to Aegean waters, but they share that water with people who do not always welcome them.