Famous beach on the southern coast of Crete. The most famous feature of this beach are the caves carved into the soft, white limestone cliffs on the northwest walls of the bay. They have been used for a variety of purposes - as places to house lepers 4,000 years ago, as burial crypts in Roman times, and finally as cheap hotels in the 1960s. Many of them even have rooms, stairs, beds, and windows. Joni Mitchell lived in one during her time here. It was here that she wrote some of her most famous folk songs: “Beneath the Matala Moon” and “Carey” (a man with whom she had an affair while staying in Matala) . Other celebrities that also came to Matala included Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Joan Baez. The good times of peace and love came to an abrupt end during the Greek dictatorship in the 1970s, when the local church expelled those sinful hippies. Today Matala is a thriving modern tourist destination, with very few remnants of their hippie past.