SANTORINI

Santorini is the rim of a volcano. The eruption that made it happened around 1600 BC and took the middle of the island with it, which is why the west coast is a 300-metre cliff and the villages stand along the top of it looking down into flooded caldera.

Everything follows from that geology. The beaches are black and red because the sand is volcanic. The villages cascade rather than sprawl. And the famous view is west, into a sunset over water, because there is nothing between the cliff edge and the horizon.

The domes really are blue here, and the churches really are that white, and the two together have been photographed so many times that the difficulty is drawing them as if for the first time. So the towel takes the cliff edge in late afternoon, when the light goes long and the whitewash starts to warm.