The Cretan Interior: Going Off the Tourist Map

The standard Crete experience: arrive at Heraklion Airport, transfer to a beach hotel somewhere between Hersonissos and Malia, spend ten days swimming in the Libyan Sea and eating at poolside restaurants. This is fine. The sea is as advertised. But it is not Crete in any meaningful sense.

The Amari Valley, in the centre of the island, is what Crete was before tourism. A sequence of villages — Thronos, Monastiraki, Fourfouras — sit in a landscape of olive groves, almond trees, and mountains that rise in every direction to snow-capped peaks. The valley was systematically destroyed by German forces in World War II in reprisal for resistance activities; many of the villages were rebuilt from scratch in the 1950s on the foundations of the originals. Walking through them, you feel the weight of recent history in a way that the beach resorts cannot replicate.

The Samaria Gorge is the most famous walk in Crete and rightly so — 16 kilometres of descent through a limestone gorge that narrows, at the Sideroportes (Iron Gates), to a width of three metres with walls 300 metres high. It requires a full day, good knees, and early arrival; the most strenuous part is the first hour of steep descent, after which the valley opens and the walk becomes something approaching meditation.

Eat in the village of Anogeia, which is the cultural heartland of Cretan music and has maintained a stubborn independence through centuries of occupiers. The restaurant Mitsos serves roast lamb from a wood-fired oven and the house wine from an unlabelled carafe. This is the food of the Cretan interior: abundant, generous, based on ingredients produced within five kilometres, and requiring no menu because there is only one correct answer to what you should eat.