Mesa Pigadia Beach

This guide to Mesa Pigadia Beach in Santorini opens with dozens of small doors carved into the black volcanic cliffs, each sealed off from nothing but bare rock behind it. It follows the syrmata, hand-cut boat shelters that generations of fishermen from Akrotiri chiseled out of cooled lava to protect their wooden boats from sudden winter storms, passed down from father to son with no single builder ever credited. Some of the caves connect through low, crawling passages that fishermen once used as shortcuts down the coast.