Santorini

Santorini is what is left of a mountain that exploded: around 1600 BC the volcano blew its centre into the sky, the sea poured into the hole, and the rim that survived — a crescent of cliffs three hundred metres high, striped in red and black — is where the white villages now balance, their blue domes facing the drowned caldera and the two dark islands still smoking gently in the middle. Oia at the north tip does the sunset; Fira does the capital; Imerovigli does the quiet; the outer coast, sloping and black, does the beaches; and beneath the ash at Akrotiri a Bronze Age town waited three and a half thousand years for its frescoes to be found.

The traveller sleeps on the rim if the budget allows one indulgence, and wakes to the caldera; walks the ten kilometres from Fira through Imerovigli to Oia along the cliff path, early, before the heat; takes the boat to Nea Kameni to stand on warm lava and swim in the sulphur springs; gives Akrotiri a morning and its frescoes in Fira's museum an hour; drinks Assyrtiko where it grows, in vines wound into baskets against the wind; swims at Perissa or Kamari on the black sand; and, one evening, skips the crush at Oia's castle and watches the sun go down from a wall in Imerovigli or Pyrgos, where the view is the same and the elbows are fewer.

The Guide's honesty: Santorini is a small island carrying a great deal of desire — in July and August the cruise ships land ten thousand people a day into lanes built for donkeys, the rim hotels charge what a week elsewhere costs, and the Oia sunset is a queue with a view — so come in May or October, book the caldera view for one night and sleep inland the rest, and see the famous things at eight in the morning; the donkeys up from the old port are tired — take the cable car or your legs; the beaches are black, hot and pebbly — bring shoes —; the wind is a resident, not a visitor; and the ferries are the island's clock: they arrive at Athinios, not Fira, and the road up is a switchback for the brave.