Sarakiniko

Sarakiniko is on the northern coast of Milos, in the Cyclades. It is not a beach in the usual sense: it is a landscape of white volcanic rock, smoothed by wind and sea into rounded forms, with a small inlet of pale sand at its centre.

The rock is consolidated volcanic ash, bleached almost white and eroded into ridges, bowls and overhangs that read as lunar in photographs — which is how the place is universally described and, for once, not unreasonably. Milos is a volcanic island whose mineral wealth has been mined since the neolithic; obsidian from here was traded across the Aegean five thousand years before the classical period, and bentonite and perlite are still extracted commercially.

There is no beach to lie on. People sit and swim from the rock, jumping into deep clear water in the inlet, and the drop-offs are abrupt. There is no shade of any kind and the white rock reflects heat back at you, which makes the middle of the day genuinely punishing. A shipwreck lies at one end and a sea cave at the other. Milos is also where the Venus de Milo was found in 1820, by a farmer, in a niche near the ancient theatre on the other side of the island.

Nothing is built. A car park and a path, and that is all — the site is protected and development is prohibited. Kleftiko on the south-west coast is reachable only by boat and is the island's other white-rock formation, and Firiplaka and Tsigrado have the coloured cliffs.

No sand, no shade, and white rock that throws the heat back at you. Come at dawn or in the evening, swim from the ledges into deep clear water, and give the middle of an August day to somewhere else entirely. Kleftiko on the other coast needs a boat and repays it.