Knossos

The site is a maze of low walls, staircases and light-wells, and it takes a moment to grasp that this warren was a single vast palace complex more than three thousand years ago.

Arthur Evans's early-20th-century reconstructions rise in red columns and painted panels among the ruins, vivid and disputed in equal measure.

Copies of the famous frescoes — dolphins, bull-leapers, the 'Prince of the Lilies' — mark where the originals were found, now kept in Heraklion's museum.

Around it the Cretan countryside is dry and bright, and the scale of the place is best felt from the higher terraces looking back across the courts and down the reconstructed grand staircase.

The palace's West Court, the largest open space in the complex, was probably used for public gatherings and bull sports, and it is here that the famous bull-leaping fresco — depicting an athlete leaping over a charging bull — was found, now one of the most reproduced images of Minoan civilisation.

Arthur Evans, who excavated the site between 1900 and 1935, coined the term Minoan civilisation and made controversial decisions about which reconstructed elements to preserve, creating the vivid red columns and painted surfaces that visitors see today, and which remain a subject of scholarly debate.

It is the centre of the Minoan world, Europe's first advanced civilisation, and the source of the Greek myth of the labyrinth and the Minotaur.

The reconstructions, controversial as they are, make Bronze Age architecture legible in a way bare foundations rarely can.

Paired with the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, where the real frescoes and finds live, it gives the fullest picture of Minoan Crete.

Knossos was the administrative, religious and economic centre of Minoan Crete, Europe's first advanced civilisation, its sprawling palace of storerooms, royal apartments and light-wells arranged around a central courtyard covering some 20,000 square metres on a hillside above the Kairatos River.