The Island of Santorini, part of the Cyclades Islands, is due north from the Island of Crete. It consists of the remnants of a huge volcano that erupted in the year 1528 BC, but newer information points to the year 1650 BC. Today the island receives a huge number of tourists, mainly during the season, but has a large stable population. Santorini is composed of the old caldera of the volcano, 9 km across, with many of the parts of its walls still in place, with hundreds of meters high cliffs, made of many different volcanic materials, from ashes, to kaolin, basalt, and pumice. The number of different colors is astounding! At the lip of the central part of the caldera lies Fira, stocked with hundreds of jewelry stores, restaurants and everything else imaginable. From here the bus took us to the ancient City of Akrotiri, being excavated at this time, and worked on, to set a new roof in place. This city, of which only a very small part has been excavated, had stone houses of up to three stories, and some of them had lovely frescoes in the upper floors. Then came the eruption. Probably a first small eruption made everyone flee, after which they returned and cleaned up the city, to live there another 20 years. But the big eruption ended by making everybody flee (as no valuables or skeletons have been found), and destroying the city by raining on it millions of tons of hot ashes and rocks which, together with strong tremors, completed the burial of the town. Here we can see a stairwell to an upper floor, cracked in half. Some researchers have proposed that this civilization was Minoan, others are strongly against the idea.