Nea Kameni

This guide to Nea Kameni in Santorini opens at Akrotiri, the Bronze Age town buried across the water, where painted rooms and jars of oil survive but not a single body, suggesting its people fled before the mountain finally exploded around 1600 BCE. It follows the scale of that eruption, the collapse that formed the caldera around you, and archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos's theory linking the buried town to Plato's Atlantis. You'll also hear how Roman writers recorded a new islet rising from this same crater in the year 19, and how the black rock beneath your feet has kept forming ever since.