Ever been to a place that you can remember not just as a disjointed collection of visuals or sounds, but a feeling as well? A feeling of wonder, excitement, or just plain happiness that you’ll always associate with this place and just thinking about it brings back those feelings in one big rush. These are the places I’ll always remember.

I’m not sure how we ended up going to Monemvasia. It was a small village teetering off one of the fingers of the Peloponnese in southern Greece, a speck on the map surrounded by plenty of other small villages I imagined would be just like it. I think my girlfriend Helen’s mum said it was nice, and the photos online – mostly of a big lump of an island connected to the mainland by a landbridge – made it look scenic if nothing else.

It certainly didn’t seem to be much of a tourist attraction by the way it was connected. We caught a bus from Athens, which dumped us seemingly in the middle of nowhere. After asking around my girlfriend discovered we’d have to catch a taxi down to the town, a ride over half an hour away through rolling groves of olive trees.

While we waited for the taxi we met a man. He was maybe a couple of years older than ourselves with messy black hair and a scruffy beard common in Greece even before the hipster beard swept the world. He was from Gefira, the slightly larger village just across the bridge from Monemvasia. He spoke in gentle tones of the island, how was a beautiful place and we’d enjoy it. He also told us to mention his name at the hotel we were to be staying at on the island – an old stone fortification that Helen booked so we could say that we stayed in a castle in Europe.

Whoever he was he seemed to hold sway with the owners of the hotel, and we found ourselves upgraded to round room inside the old tower. Embedded in the roof were little fairylights that I think were supposed to emulate the night sky. I think it was a bit of a fad back then, nonetheless, it was nice to lie back under hundreds of little dots of light, especially after smashing my head a couple of times on the extremely low doorways.

By this point we still hadn’t really seen Monemvasia, the hotel was on the bridge-side of the island, looking back towards Gefira. It was a pleasant enough seaside town, but not exactly picturesque compared to the sights on the Greek islands (Santorini comes to mind). We’d wander over to the other side of the island the following day.

Many parts of Greece are hot and dusty in the summer, with a golden-yellow haze that seems to settle over everything, from the whitewashed houses to the sun-dried vegetation. The short road around the island was just that. What greeted us on the other side was an impressively high but crumbling stone wall in that same sand-blasted yellow colour, stretching from the steep cliff face to the bright blue Mediterranean. It looked like we were in for a long, hot day exploring the ruins of a fortification. Not a bad way to spend the afternoon, but certainly a tiring one, and it was something we’d already seen a few times before in Greece. I was wrong, those walls were misleading.

Stepping through the gate we found ourselves in a tight twisting maze of houses, restaurants, shops and churches (lots of churches). While some were ruined many were still very much occupied and open for business. This was an old village, certainly, but it was still very much alive. It was a small stone town crammed between two stone walls at each end and wedged between the high cliffs and the sea. It was like nothing I’d never seen before.

The sun beat down on orange terracotta roofs supported by the same yellow-brown stones that made up the fortified walls. It wasn’t something you’d expect to see in a region where every building appears to be whitewashed and flat-topped. Apparently it was an influence of the alternating rule of the Byzantines, Venetians and Ottomons who all controlled the village at one point or another, and it presented something new, exciting and most importantly different for us to explore. Not something we’d seen in the guidebooks.

The town may have been alive but it was very sleepy at the time of our visit in early September. The summer crowds had faded and we had a pretty clear run of the place. My overall impression of the town was one of restful beauty, where every gap between the buildings framed a serene view of the sparkling blue sea.

Behind the village you could climb climb climb up the steep cliffs for a spectacular view of the sprawl of buildings below. Further up, on the very top of the island and away from the town proper, stood an enormous Orthodox church. Only in Greece.

There’s a magic to this place, perhaps heightened by my relative inexperience with overseas travel at the time, combined with the quiet time of year we visited and the golden end-of-summer light, that I’ll never forget. I see photos of it at different times of year, when the vegetation is green and the skies are grey, and it doesn’t look half as exciting as when we visited. I don’t think I’ll go back, I want to always remember it how it looks in my photos and in my mind, gold, brown and orange under an endless blue sky.