Spinalonga

Spinalonga is a small island off the northeast coast of Crete, in the sheltered gulf beside the resort town of Elounda, and you reach it by a short boat ride from Elounda or Plaka. From the water it looks like exactly what it first was: a Venetian fortress, its ramparts wrapping the low hill in tiers of honey-grey stone, built in the 16th century to guard the gulf and held by Venice long after the rest of Crete fell to the Ottomans. But the fortress is not why most people come, and it is not why I will remember it.

The colony

From 1903 to 1957, Spinalonga was a leper colony — one of the last in Europe. People diagnosed with Hansen’s disease across Greece were sent here, often by force, and the island became a town of the exiled: a main street of shops, a church, a small hospital, houses where people married, raised children, ran businesses, and built ordinary lives inside a place designed to remove them from the world. You walk in through a tunnel in the wall that the residents called Dante’s Gate, because you passed through it not knowing what waited on the other side. What waits now is a quiet street of roofless stone houses, doorways opening onto sky, bougainvillea growing through the windows. Lia and I went round it slowly and barely spoke. It is not a sad place exactly — the people here resisted being only patients, and the town they made is the evidence — but it asks something of you.

The last priest and the long goodbye

The colony did not close cleanly. After the last patients left in 1957, a priest stayed on alone for several more years to hold the proper memorial services for those buried here, because Orthodox custom requires them at set intervals after death and there was no one else to do it. I find that detail almost unbearably moving — one man remaining on an emptied island so that the dead would be remembered correctly. The graves are still here, and so is the disinfection chamber by the gate where new arrivals were processed, and the whole island became internationally known after Victoria Hislop set her novel The Island here in 2005, which is why the boats from Elounda are now full.

How to visit well

Go early. The first boats of the day land before the tour groups, and you can have the main street nearly to yourself for half an hour, which is the only way to feel the place properly. Bring water and a hat — there is almost no shade and the stone holds the heat — and give yourself a couple of hours rather than the rushed forty minutes the package trips allow. The boat ride from Plaka is the shortest and the village of Plaka itself, just across the water, has the best tavernas for lunch afterward, looking back at the island you have just walked through.

When to go: May, June, September, or October for warm, calm crossings without the August crush. Take the first boat of the morning, always.