It’s a ten-minute walk from the village to the bay. 

The track starts at the hairpin bend on the road leading out of the village and meanders down along the course of a dried up creek. On either side, the olive groves climb in steps fashioned from dry stone walls that seem to grow from the soil. 

The cicadas keep up their racket until they stop, and then there’s silence – perfect silence – until they start again. 

Shafts of sunlight beam green through the canopy, warming the dust and leaf litter on the ground, releasing a perfume – wild thyme, rosemary and olive wood – that you’ll suddenly recall exactly, many years later, in a London doorway on a rainy winter evening.

At the bottom of the hill, the path bends round to the right, the trees give way to spinnifex and scrub and the track turns from mulch to dust to sand before spilling you out onto Mirtiotissa Beach, where everything is blue and white and still.  

It’s a ten minute walk at an easy pace. And the villagers say that in a thousand years or more, no-one has ever walked it in less.