Delos, the sacred island next door

In myth Leto gave birth to Apollo and Artemis here, and Delos became the sacred centre of the Ionian Greeks. People lived on the island as early as the 3rd millennium BC. To keep the sanctuary pure, Athens 'purified' it twice: once under Pisistratus in the 6th century BC, and then, in 426 BC, the whole island. From then on no one was allowed to be born or to die on Delos; the old graves were dug up and carried across to Rhenia, and the dying and the pregnant were shipped across too.

From 478 to 454 BC the treasury of the Delian League was kept here. In 166 BC Rome made Delos a free port, and it boomed into a cosmopolitan trading town where merchants from all over the Mediterranean lived side by side, with temples to foreign gods, a synagogue and a slave market said to handle tens of thousands of people. Mithridates' forces sacked it in 88 BC and pirates in 69 BC; it never recovered, and by the 8th century AD it was abandoned.

Today only a handful of people live on Delos, guards and archaeologists among them; the 2011 census counted 24. You cannot stay the night: the boats bring you in the morning and take you back in the afternoon.