The Samaria Gorge is the longest walkable gorge in Europe, sixteen kilometres through the White Mountains of western Crete, dropping from pine forest at 1,230 metres to a beach on the Libyan Sea. It is walked one way, downhill, because there is no road at the bottom. The start is Xyloskalo, a steep stone stairway under the peak of Gingilos, and the forest gives out within an hour or two. After that the trail is often the riverbed itself, a winding ribbon of white boulders and gravel that you cross and recross on stepping stones, past pools of ice-cold water and clumps of oleander. The walls close as you go. At the Iron Gates they stand about three metres apart with three hundred metres of cliff above them, and the sky is reduced to a bright thread. The whole descent takes six to eight hours on stone, and the steady downhill punishes knees far more than sixteen kilometres sounds like it should.
Halfway down, the roofless houses of Samaria village stand under enormous plane trees beside a spring where you can fill a bottle, and everyone stops here. The Skordilis family settled in the gorge in the 1300s, fleeing the coast, and for generations it sheltered Cretans resisting Venetian and then Ottoman rule, because the few ways in were easy to hold. The last families were moved out in 1962, when the gorge was made a national park, largely for the sake of an animal on the ledges above them. The kri-kri, the Cretan goat, is not truly wild: it descends from some of the first goats people ever domesticated, brought here about eight thousand years ago and left to run free. By 1960 fewer than two hundred were left. The route is open from May to the end of October, since winter sends the river back through the narrows. It ends at Agia Roumeli, on grey pebbles, where you walk straight into the warm Libyan Sea and then leave the way everyone has always left this gorge, by boat.