Southern Heraklion: Phaistos Minoan Palace, Gortyn and the Hippie Caves of Matala

Sixty-five kilometres south-west of Heraklion (55 minutes on a fast highway across the island's agricultural breadbasket, the Messara Plain), you can combine three extraordinary historical eras, a 1900 BC Minoan royal palace, the Roman capital of Crete, and the famous 1960s sandstone cliff caves of the Libyan Sea, in a single effortless day.

1. The Minoan Palace of Phaistos

Perched atop a commanding hill overlooking the olive-blanketed Messara Plain with snow-streaked 2,456-metre Mount Ida (Psiloritis) towering to the north, Phaistos was the second-largest Minoan palace in Crete and the exact spot where Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier unearthed the world-famous Phaistos Disc in 1908. Many travellers prefer Phaistos to Knossos for two reasons: it has a fraction of the crowds, and because Sir Arthur Evans did not rebuild Phaistos in painted concrete, you walk across 100% authentic, untouched 3,700-year-old Minoan limestone and gypsum floors, climbing the monumental 14-metre-wide Grand Theater Staircase.

2. Ancient Gortyn

Right beside the main highway stands Gortyn, which replaced Knossos as the huge Roman capital of Crete and Cyrenaica (North Africa). Step inside the 6th-century AD Basilica of St Titus and the Roman Odeon to stand before the curved stone wall of the 450 BC "Law Code of Gortyn", the longest surviving ancient Greek legal inscription in the world (carved in boustrophedon script where lines read alternately left-to-right and right-to-left like an ox ploughing a field).

3. Matala Beach, The Sandstone Caves & Red Beach

Fifteen minutes south-west of Phaistos, the Messara plain ends at the horseshoe cove of Matala, in mythology, the exact beach where Zeus swam ashore carrying the Phoenician princess Europa on his back. Bounding the northern side of the golden sand beach is a sheer golden-yellow porous sandstone cliff honeycombed with dozens of multi-level rock-cut caves:

• From Roman Tombs to Joni Mitchell's "Carey": carved in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD as Roman rock-cut chamber tombs, the caves were inhabited in the 1960s and early 1970s by a peaceful international community of hippies, including Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, who lived in a Matala cave in spring 1970 and immortalised the village and its "Mermaid Café" in her classic 1971 song Carey ("The wind is in from Africa, sleepless summer nights"). Climb through the caves (small ticket), swim in the bay, or hike 25 minutes over the southern hill to secluded Red Beach.