The Venetians named it Spinalonga, but the Greek name is Kalydon, and the island was not an island at all until engineers cut it free from the Kolokytha peninsula in 1526. That single act of excavation created the strait that a spinalonga boat trip from plaka still crosses today, a channel barely 400 metres wide between the village quay and the fortress wall. The fortifications came in 1579, designed by Genese Bruno on the ruins of an ancient acropolis that had guarded the entrance to the harbour of Olous. Twenty-five bastions and gun platforms ringed the rock. The Ottomans besieged Crete for a generation and took Candia in 1669, yet Spinalonga held out until 1715, one of the last Venetian possessions in the Aegean. Ottoman families then settled inside the walls, farming and trading until the early twentieth century, when the newly autonomous Cretan State found another use for the fortress. From 1903 to 1957 Spinalonga was a leper colony, the last in Europe. Patients arrived through Dante's Gate, a low tunnel cut through the seaward rampart, deliberately blind so that no one could see the settlement before entering it. Inside, they built something unexpected: a main street of shops, a cinema, a church dedicated to Agios Panteleimon, a bakery, a hospital. Epaminondas Remoundakis, a law student sent to the island in 1936, founded the Brotherhood of Patients and campaigned for supplies, wages and dignity. The colony closed in 1957, five years after sulphone treatment reached Greece. The island stood empty for decades. Today the ruins are an archaeological site of the Greek Ministry of Culture, and among the most visited Lasithi landmarks, a status sharpened by Victoria Hislop's 2005 novel The Island and the Greek television series that followed. Restoration has been continuous: masonry consolidation on the Venetian half-moon bastions, reroofing along the main street, interpretive signage in Greek and English. What visitors encounter on Spinalonga Island boat tours is therefore a layered site rather than a single monument — Venetian military engineering, Ottoman domestic architecture and twentieth-century social history stacked on eleven hectares of limestone. The 20 EUR conservation fee funds that ongoing work, and it applies per person to the archaeological site itself, separately from any crossing. Operators run from Plaka, Elounda and Agios Nikolaos, and the fuller Mirabello Gulf itineraries pair the fortress with Kolokytha Bay. Whichever route a traveller chooses, a spinalonga boat trip from plaka remains the shortest approach to the walls, and spinalonga boat trip from plaka tickets are among the most requested in eastern Crete each summer.