HIKING THE SAMARIA GORGE
The Samaria Gorge, named after Saint Maria of Egypt, is the largest gorge on Crete and contains Crete’s most famous hiking trail. As the largest gorge in Europe, it is so special that it is Crete’s only national park. Aside from its spectacular scenery, it has several other distinctive features. First of all, you are unlikely to have a solitary experience. During high season, about 3,000 hikers daily make the trip down from the Park entrance just below Omalos to Agia Roumeli on Crete’s south coast. Even in the shoulder season, when the gorge is open, 1,000 hikers often make the trip each day. In May, we were in the shoulder season.
We got off to an early start at just before 8 AM, but as time went on more and more hikers who had started later but who were faster walkers passed us. We were spared the usual crowds, however due to an unusual circumstance, but more about that later. Secondly, as you will see from our account, the logistics for this hike are formidable, but for a little money well organized tour organizations will take care of all that for you if you have a long day to dedicate to the trip.
We were staying at a hotel in Chania, and arranged a tour through the hotel reception desk. It made for an early morning, with a hotel departure before 7 AM, but the bus trip to Omalos was interesting in itself. The road climbs higher and higher into the White Mountains into a refreshingly rural setting. The mountains are so named not because they are snow covered, but because they are crowned with a light-coloured rock formation. After Omalos, which is a very small village with a population of under 50 people, the road descends slightly to the trailhead, which lies at 1250 meters elevation.
The hike begins at 1230 meters above sea level, once you have paid the five Euro park entrance fee. A wide steep rough stone path quickly takes you down some 600 vertical meters through a pine forest. As you descend, views of the gorge itself can be glimpsed to the left through the trees. Eventually the trail flattens a little, and you reach a rest area near the Agios Nikolaos Chapel. This is the first rest stop on the 14 to 16 kilometer (depending on the guide book) trail, and has several points of interest, including a very old giant cypress tree. At Agios Nikolaos, you have descended about half way back down to sea level, as the elevation loss on the entire trail is just over 1200 meters.
The trail had many ancient-looking water sources with water that was said to be potable. They would likely have been a welcome sight on a typically hot Cretan summer day. Our day was cool and cloudy, with occasional small rain showers, so they did not seem as critical to us. The flora was also interesting with Calabrian Pine and Cypress forests, and some unusual flowers.
Some distance beyond Agios Nikolaos we reached our next resting spot, the abandoned village of Samaria. When the gorge became a national park in 1962, this ancient village was abandoned, and the inhabitants moved elsewhere. Now some of the buildings are used by the national park, but most seem empty. They and many stone walls stand testament to the past. Agios Nikolaos has toilets, and a number of other toilets are available along the trail.
Below the village of Samaria, the gorge soon narrows and becomes quite spectacular. It remains spectacular all the way to the Iron Gates (Sideroportes) at the 11 kilometer mark. There the gorge is at its narrowest, with its dramatic walls only some 3.5 meters apart.
As we are relatively slow walkers, we had expected many hikers to pass us, but after the first few hours, we found ourselves more and more on our own. We later learned that due to the unsettled weather and the threat of thunder showers, the trail was closed at 10:00 AM, and only about 350 hikers would do the trail that day. This made for a very pleasant hiking experience indeed. The trail remained closed the whole next day as well due to the threat of floods from predicted thunderstorms.
The exit from the national park is reached at approximately 12 kilometers. Interestingly, here one is expected to show one’s entry ticket in order to exit. Then there is a further walk of over two kilometers, most of it on a paved narrow road, to the town of Agia Roumeli. Along the way there are some taverns and restaurants, and then some rustic farms. At the park exit, there are some picnic tables and this is a good spot to relax and gather strength before moving on.
As mentioned previously, the logistics of a Samaria Gorge hike are formidable, even with the help of a tour company. We arrived at Agia Roumeli at about 2:30 PM, after a hike of a little over 6 hours. This included a number of breaks, including a long one just after we left the national park. We would have preferred longer and more frequent breaks to enjoy the ambiance of the gorge, but our guide had concerns about the weather. Water levels in the gorge, particularly at narrow points like the Iron Gates, can rise very quickly with rainstorms in the area, and the weather was very unsettled. He therefore strongly encouraged us not to tarry too long at the rest stops.
As a result, we had a wait of three hours at Agia Roumeli until the ferry departed for Sougia. However, our time on the black beach there was quite pleasant. The day was cloudy, and a cool wind was blowing off the Libyan Sea, so the weather was not uncomfortably hot.
The ferry ride to Sougia, another small town on the southern coast of Crete, was 40 minutes long, and paralleled the very rugged coast. At Sougia we boarded our tour bus, and one and a half hours later arrived back at our hotel, the Sensimar Kalliston hotel, in Chania. The bus ride back to Chania was almost as spectacular as our hike, as the bus crossed the mountain spine between the southern and northern coasts of western Crete. Small white villages clung to precipitous slopes as remaining symbols of times past in Crete, while at the height of land between the two coasts huge steel windmills took advantage of the prevailing winds and generated electric power to symbolize the new modern Crete. Numerous olive trees covered the gentler and some not so gentle slopes, and as we approached the northern coast, heavily laden orange trees reminded us that we were in a sub-tropical country. Then we witnessed extreme feats of skill and daring as our driver manoeuvred our huge bus through the narrow and busy streets of Chania to our hotel.
It had been a long but very interesting day.