Matala beach

This guide to Matala beach in Heraklion opens with a stove exploding inside a cliffside cave and a red-haired American cook stumbling out through the smoke, watched from the sand by a heartbroken Canadian singer freshly arrived in the strangest little village she'd ever seen. You'll hear how people had carved these cliffside chambers since the Neolithic period and the Romans later used some as burial crypts, before nineteen-sixties travelers turned the empty tombs into free rooms with sea views. The guide follows what grew between the singer and the cook during the weeks that followed, and how word of the caves' free-living community eventually reached the church and the military government.