The Samaria Gorge narrows, at a point called the Iron Gates, to barely three metres across, with walls some 300 metres high squeezing the Cretan sky into a thin blue ribbon. It runs for sixteen kilometres through the White Mountains of southwest Crete, dropping from the Xyloskalo trailhead at around 1,230 metres to the shore of the Libyan Sea. That makes it the longest walkable gorge in Europe, and the walk goes one way only: no road reaches the far end. Greece made the valley a national park in 1962, chiefly to save the kri-kri, the shy Cretan goat that clings on almost nowhere else. Halfway down, the roofless stone houses of the old village of Samaria stand under a canopy of huge plane trees, with a spring running beside them.
The walk down takes six to eight hours. You set out early on the knee-jarring wooden steps of the Xyloskalo, then thread a dry bed of white gravel between giant boulders, past ice-cold springs, pink oleander and plane trees. As the sun climbs, the limestone shifts from honey gold to grey-blue, and at the Iron Gates you edge through the narrows before the walls fall away toward the sea. Keep an eye on the high ledges: the kri-kri show themselves most often to walkers moving quietly in the early morning. The park opens from the first of May to the end of October and shuts in winter, when the river floods the narrow passages, and wardens make sure everyone starts early enough to finish before the last boat. The reward waits where few hikes end — a pebble beach on the Libyan Sea at Agia Roumeli, warm enough for a swim while you wait for the ferry out.