Spinalonga Island on the way to becoming UNESCO Heritage site – first in Crete
Due to its strategic location, it was fortified and served a variety of roles and purposes over the centuries.
When you are visiting Crete make sure you take a day to visit this very magical island, just a short boat ride from Plaka port nearby Elounda.
Spinalonga has been an important place throughout Greek history, a hiding place for pirates, for the Venetians as a fortress; and more recently the island served as a leper colony.
“Spinalonga. She played with the word rolling it around her tongue like an olive stone. 
The island lay directly ahead and as the boat approached the great Venetian fortification which fronted the sea […]. This, she speculated, might be a place where history was still warm, not stone cold, where the inhabitants were really not mythical”….
… as Victoria Hislop wrote in her best-selling book “The Island”.
Here, on an island where lepers from Crete and the rest of Greece had been kept in isolation until 1957, a story about love and pain, separation and fear was born.
Inset pic, Victoria Hislop’s The Island, recommended reading, fiction novel based on story set on Spinalonga 👍🏽
Vivaellada 