Sarakiniko is a bare white headland on Milos that looks nothing like the rest of Greece: no sand, no plants, no shade, just smooth stone swells and hollows running down into the Aegean. The rock is volcanic ash and pumice. It is soft enough that the north wind and the waves it drives have sanded it into curves, and pale enough to throw the midday sun back so hard it hurts to look at. A narrow drowned ravine cuts in from the sea, and inside it the water turns deep turquoise against all that white. You walk straight out onto warm stone, spread a towel on the rock itself, and jump from the low ledges into the inlet. There is no gate and no ticket.
This was a sea floor before it was a beach. The ash beds are more than a hundred metres thick and settled underwater off the Hellenic volcanic arc, where the African plate grinds beneath Europe. Pale diatomite and yellowish limestone in the same layers still hold the shells, sea urchins and fish that were buried with them. East of the inlet lie the rusted remains of the tanker Africa, driven onto the rocks in a storm in December 2003 and slowly taken apart by the surf. Sarakiniko is now one of the most photographed places in the Aegean, and by late morning in summer the white plateau is dotted with people. Early and late it changes character: low sun turns the rock pink and peach, every hollow fills with shadow, and after dark the pale ground stays faintly visible under the stars.