Spinalonga was never an island. Venetian engineers cut it loose from the Kolokytha peninsula in 1526, dredging a channel so their artillery could cover the mouth of Elounda Gulf. The fortress completed in 1579 ringed the rock with 35 bastions and gun platforms angled at the open water of Mirabello Bay. The sightline those gunners worked is the sightline that boat trip Crete Agios Nikolaos tours still follow out of the harbour. The walls outlived their purpose twice over. Crete fell to the Ottomans in 1669, yet Spinalonga held until 1715, sheltering refugees and privateers behind masonry three metres thick. Ottoman families then farmed the salt pans across the water at Elounda until 1903. From 1904 to 1957 the rock served as a leper colony, counting some 400 residents at its height. They built the arched high street, the bakery, the rainwater cisterns and the small chapel that visitors walk past today, and they built all of it from stone quarried on site. That second chapter is why the island is busy now. Victoria Hislop's 2005 novel The Island, and the Greek television adaptation that followed in 2010, turned a quarantined rock into one of eastern Crete's most visited landmarks — reached from Plaka, 400 metres across the channel, or on the longer crossing from the Agios Nikolaos waterfront. A 20 EUR conservation fee per adult, payable on-site at the island, funds the slow consolidation of walls that salt air has been eating for four centuries. Σπιναλόγκα boat trips also pass Olous, the Hellenistic settlement whose foundations lie in shallow water near the Elounda isthmus. The fabric rewards attention. Entry is through a tunnel the colony called Dante's Gate, a vaulted passage cut so that arrivals could not see what waited beyond. Past it, two-storey houses in Venetian rubble stone line a street barely three metres wide, their lintels still carrying iron hinges. Half-moon bastions step down to the sea on the western flank. The Orthodox church of Agios Panteleimon sits in the lee of the hill, roofed and whitewashed, while numbered graves in the cemetery on the eastern slope record no names at all. Across the channel, Kolokytha's sheltered bay and the chapel of Agios Loukas give Elounda Gulf cruises their swimming water. A boat trip Crete Agios Nikolaos tour reads, in the end, as a passage between two Cretes: the fortified one and the one that swims.