Fira

This guide to Fira in Santorini centers on shipowner Evangelos Nomikos, who around 1979 looked down at mules hauling tourists up six hundred steps from the old port and decided to build a cable car himself, funding it with his wife Loula rather than waiting for a company to do it. It follows the Austrian-engineered lift's construction in the early 1980s and the dilemma it created for the mule drivers whose livelihood depended on that same climb. Listen for the mules still braying somewhere below the cable car station as you make the crossing.