Sightseeing in Santorini

Santorini is not an island so much as the rim of a crater. Around 1600 BC the volcano threw its own centre into the sky, the sea poured into the hole, and what was left of the round land is a crescent standing up to three hundred metres above the water. That is why everything here faces one way: the white villages line the cliff edge, and below them lies the flooded caldera with two black islets in the middle. Sightseeing tours gather that geometry into a day — Fira on the brink, Oia on the northern cape, Pyrgos with its Venetian castle inland, and Imerovigli at the highest point of the ridge.

The sunset at Oia is a genre of its own. The crowd is such that it only makes sense either to arrive two hours early or to watch from the water: catamarans time their run for exactly that hour and hold position off the cape. Many programmes pair the sunset with a winery — vines here are trained into a basket coiled on the ground, so the plant hides from the wind and collects the night moisture, and assyrtiko off that vine comes out dense and saline. A tasting on a terrace above the caldera is usually the point of the whole trip.

The rest is about what lies under the ash and above the water. Akrotiri, the Minoan town buried by the eruption, kept its two- and three-storey houses, its frescoes and its plumbing; a roof was built over it and you walk the streets. The volcano is a separate outing: a boat to the black cone of Nea Kameni, a climb over loose scree to the crater, and a swim in the warm sulphur springs off Palea Kameni, where the water runs the colour of rust.