The hour everyone remembers

I have photographed a lot of famous views and very few of them survive the comparison with their own postcards. Oia does. The whole village is built on the inside wall of a drowned volcano, which means the houses are not looking at the view, they are hanging in it, and when the light goes low and gold the white walls start throwing it back at each other. You can feel the temperature of the whole place change in about fifteen minutes. It is genuinely thrilling, and I say that as someone who has stood there with a camera more than once.

Where I actually stand

Not the castle. The ruined Byzantine castle at the western tip is where the guidebooks send everyone, and by seven in the evening it is a wall of phones. I love the castle at eight in the morning, when it is yours and the light is clean and cool. For sunset I go the other way and stay high on the main footpath toward Imerovigli, where you get Oia itself in the frame with the sun behind it, which is the better photograph anyway. My quiet favourite is a terrace table with a drink in hand and no scramble for position at all, and that is the version I set up for clients: a private guide who walks you out an hour early through the back lanes, tells you what you are looking at, and has somewhere lovely waiting at the end of it.

Then go down to the water

Here is the part most people miss. When the sun drops, everyone turns and walks uphill, and Amoudi Bay empties out exactly as the cliffs above it turn that extraordinary rust red. A few hundred steps down, or the municipal shuttle if you would rather save your legs, and you are at a handful of tavernas on the water with the fishing boats still tied up. Private cars are not allowed on the Ammoudi road at the moment, so this is one to arrange rather than improvise, and the walk out to the little chapel at Cape Agios Nikolaos is closed for now too. None of that spoils it. It is still the loveliest half hour of the day in Oia and almost nobody is there for it.

Bring this with you

Walking shoes with grip, because every surface here is polished marble and stone and it is all either up or down. A light layer for after dark, since the wind comes off the caldera and turns cool fast. And give the island more than one evening, because the first sunset you spend looking at your screen and the second one you actually watch.

Inquire about a private Santorini trip

Pair it with

Planning the whole island: The Rolodex: Santorini. Getting your head around it before you go: The Primer: Santorini. The practical details, start to finish: Santorini : The Dossier.