Understandably, the authorities and NGOs who help run and fund the camps are wary about letting ‘visitors’ speak with journalists. Many are traumatised and as in Lampedusa nobody knows exactly what to do with the migrants or what restrictions – if any – are legal or possible. But along the road and down on the beach is an impromptu collection of tents. On the highway wall opposite someone has graffitied in huge capital letters ‘Refugees! Condemn the deal! No person is illegal! Welcome refugees!’ Similar messages are scrawled in Spanish. If you were to come off a boat at this point, as some of the migrants do, these are the first words you will see in Europe.

The collection of tents opposite is run by a ‘No Borders Group’. A young German called Justus comes over smoking a roll-up cigarette. He is from Dresden, he mentions apologetically. A fortnight ago he and a group of like-minded Germans, French and Swiss people opened a social centre in a decrepit ruin of a building on the other side of the road. It was not intended to be an asylum centre, but a day centre to give the migrants somewhere to come and escape the tedium of the camps. But after only a few days the bank that owned the building, fearing that they were setting up an illegal camp, threw them out. So here they are on the beach opposite, with a few large makeshift tents, trying to keep their movement going. Oda, a German woman in her forties, from Hanover, who is coping badly in the midday sun, explains, ‘It is not enough to simply keep going to demonstrations and chanting “No borders”. It is also necessary to do something.’

Here is where this group, mainly comprised of Germans, are trying to do their bit to help. It is ramshackle, underfunded and slightly shambolic. A family who walk blithely past all the refugee signs and come each day to this encampment to help themselves to tea turn out to be a local Roma family who already live on Lesbos. Oda shows the photographs of the building they have just had to vacate. On the wall in the main rooms of what had been their social centre they had whitewashed the walls and hung brightly coloured baubles. The centre’s rules were painted in blue and red on the walls. These were (bullet-pointed), ‘No racism. No violence. No sexism. No homophobia.’