Your Cretan Adventure
Crete is the largest of the Greek islands,
extremely popular among tourists but still full of secrets and wild.
The perfect place for your next adventure.
Crete - a continent
Crete is 260 km long, 60 km wide, but its coastline is about 1050 km long. Bays, peninsulas, then more bays, more peninsulas, and so on, and so on ad infinitum – hence the 1000 km of coastline. In addition, a wreath of satellite islands around. On the map, Crete has the most unusual and complicated shape, unlike anything else.
Crete has high mountains, wide plains, high plateaus, dozens of mountain gorges with almost vertical walls and almost exclusively seasonal rivers. In addition, hundreds of amazing beaches and dozens of cities with the oldest artifacts of European culture.
Crete still has a huge amount of wild landscape and quite well-developed agriculture (mainly olives and oranges). Crete is surprisingly green in the valleys (trees do not lose their leaves in winter) and surprisingly gray-yellow-burgundy in the mountains.
Crete seems to have everything, hence the often repeated statement that it is not an island but a continent.
Perfect climate and amazing nature
Crete has over 300 sunny days a year. Even in “winter” it rains mainly at night, and the sun comes out in the morning. What kind of winter is it, since even in January the temperature often exceeds 20 degrees C? Interestingly, the autumn months (October, November, December) are often warmer then the spring ones. This means that tourism and all outdoor activities can be practiced in Crete all year round. On the coasts, there is no snow at all but snow lies high in the mountains for four months. In summer it is hot, 35 degrees Celsius is no exception and the real temperature felt can be high even on the mountain tops. High in the mountains it is also very dry, there are no rivers or water sources, despite the fact that the annual precipitation in the highest parts of the White Mountains is 2000 mm, which is three times more than in London.
Crete has developed tourism and can be crowded in the north, but the center and south of the island are the kingdom of wilderness, full of hard-to-reach and completely empty places. Crete is an ideal place for any exploration.
Wild hiking paths
There is only one comfort hiking path in Crete, largely built for tourists – the route through the Samaria Gorge. All the rest are natural shepherd’s paths or old stone roads – kalderimi – both very easily overgrowing with plants and both accumulating all possible stones, therefore, they has an unrestrained tendency to disappear. There are very few forests in Crete, so few soft paths, but they exist. The lack of trees makes almost all the trails scenic, and the lack of soft paths means that there is no mud in Crete – nowhere! There are also trails on the island (even marked with some signs) on which no path can be seen, we move on them using GPX files or our own memory.
Tourist trails in Crete are a challenge for every hiker or runner. The best place to explore!
Crete for runners
Crete is a real paradise for runners. The most interesting are of course mountains: Lefka Ori, Psiloritis, Asterusia, Lasithi. Although running paths are technically very difficult, but the running season lasts all year, even in December or January you can run on dry paths without snow in full sun. Many routes lead along the sea or end on the beach (e.g. Samaria, Araden, Imbros gorges), so you can cool down immediately after the run.
Crete has a quite large mountain runners community and at least a few very interesting running competitions: Sfakia Sky Marathon (44 km, October), Crocodile Trail (21 km, March), Minoiko Monopati (26 km, March) or Sitia Geopark Trail (24 km, October).
Cretan heritage
Crete is full of cultural treasures from all periods of history.
Crete is home to the oldest European culture – for lack of a better name, the Minoan. Its remains – up to 5,000 years old – are still found on the island, and the greatest treasures are gathered in the Archaeological Museum in Heraklion. The Minoan culture is not only the oldest, its artistic refinement still delights modern viewers, and the complete lack of violence in all the found artifacts makes one wonder at the strange ways in which human civilization has developed.
Over the thousands of years of its history, Crete has gone through various stages, successively ruled by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Venetians and Turks, and each of these communities has left its traces on the island. The most visible today are the Venetian remains, all the large cities still have a clearly visible Venetian atmosphere, manifested mainly in their architecture. However, beautiful Venetian townhouses can be found not only in the old town of Chania, sometimes such architectural pearls emerge suddenly during wandering through small, lost in the landscape villages.
Another, no less amazing element of historical heritage, are thousands of kilometers of old stone roads called kalderimi, nowadays sometimes used as tourist paths (Vasiliki Strata).
Modern Crete also has a lot to offer all open-minded souls who want to watch and listen, especially in the field of music. In many taverns you can hear traditional Cretan music bands, the island also has its own jazz festivals and even classical music bands.
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Our Adventures
About Us
We are mountain lovers, explorers of new, unknown paths. We love walking and running in the most remote corners of Crete. Although we are an international group, we are based in Chania for many years. We have experience in organizing tourist expeditions, multi-day trips into wilderness and trail running competitions.
Angela
Greg
Testimonials
56
Completed Projects in the mountains
3054
Happy Customers
128
running competitons
15
new routes created
