Half Day Cape Sounio (Sunset)

Seventy kilometres of coast road south from the city, and it is worth the drive on its own: Glyfada, Vouliagmeni, Varkiza, the beaches and the marinas, and then the road empties out and it is just rock and sea until the cape.

There has been a sanctuary on this headland since the archaic period. The Persians destroyed the first temple in 480 BC, in the campaign in which Xerxes forced the pass at Thermopylae and then razed Athens itself. What stands now was built to replace it — 444 to 440 BC, in Pericles’ building programme, the same years as the Parthenon.

It is Doric, and it was designed for this specific cliff: thirty-four columns originally, cut slimmer than the Doric norm — possibly against the wind on an exposed cape — from local Agrileza marble, which is why they take the evening light the way they do. Fifteen are still standing after two and a half thousand years of salt and earthquakes. Inside stood a bronze Poseidon over six metres tall.

Near the entrance, at the base of a column, is the most famous graffiti in Greece: BYRON. He carved it on his Grand Tour, and came back years later to fight in the Greek War of Independence and die for it. He gave the place a line as well: Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep, where nothing, save the waves and I, may hear our mutual murmurs sweep.

On a clear evening you can see Kea and Kythnos out in the haze.

It is not a marketing claim, it is why the tour exists. The temple faces west across open water with nothing between it and the horizon, and the archaeological site — unusually for Greece — stays open until the sun is down.

The marble goes through the whole range: white, then gold, then the colour of the light, then a black colonnade against a red sky. Then everyone stops talking for a minute, which is the part nobody photographs.