Samariá Gorge National Park

The Samariá Gorge cuts through the White Mountains of western Crete in a single long descent from the Omalos plateau to the Libyan Sea. The walk begins at Xyloskalo, at about 1,230 metres, where a stair of logs once helped walkers down the first steep drop; today stone steps and a railing do the job. From there the path follows a stream bed for roughly 13 km through the national park, and a further couple of kilometres bring you out at the seaside village of Agia Roumeli. It is one of the longest gorges in Europe, and the people of Sfakia will tell you there is only one real gorge on Crete, and that all the others are merely gorges.

Its climax is the Portes, the Gates, near the southern end: here the walls close in to only three or four metres apart while rising for hundreds of metres overhead, and the stream often fills the whole passage. Midway down lies the abandoned village of Samariá, whose last inhabitants left in 1962 when the national park was created; the gorge takes its name from the village's old church of Óssia María. In Ottoman times the ravine was a refuge for rebels and for local people in flight.

The park was one of the first in Greece and has been part of UNESCO's biosphere reserve network since 1981. It was created above all to protect the kri-kri, the wild Cretan goat, which you may glimpse on the rock faces, along with endemic plants and a wealth of birds. The walk takes five to seven hours and is demanding in summer heat; overnight stays, fires and swimming in the stream are forbidden inside the park.

Getting there

The northern entrance at Xyloskalo is about 42 km by road from Chania, and Chania International Airport (CHQ) is about 34 km from the park by straight line. Buses and organised tours run from Chania to the top of the gorge. Agia Roumeli has no road: walkers leave by ferry to Chora Sfakion or to Sougia and Paleochora, where buses connect back to Chania.