Vatera

The 7 km long, sandy beach here, backed by vegetated hills and looking out to Hios and Psara, offers some of the warmest, cleanest swimming on Lesvos.

3 km away is Agios Fokas, where foundations and columns stubs remain of the temple of Dionysos and an early Christian basilica.

The fossils include bones of stenoid horses (Equus stenonis), mastodons, a baboon-like monkey (Paradolichopithecus) and a giant tortoise (Cheirogaster), the latter the size of a small car.

Around two million years ago, Lesvos was not an island but was joined to the Asian mainland, and the gulf of Vatera was a subtropical shallow sea.

In the nearby village of Vrissa, the University of Athens has established a natural history collection dedicated to the palaeontological finds.