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Chania is a blessed and privileged place with a mild climate during
the whole year, countless beauties and all kinds of attractions.
Apart from its five hundred villages, the area counts more than 100
very clean beaches on the northern and southern coasts, a hundred mountain tops
and about 1500 caves, as well as countless monuments and gorges of incomparable
wilderness and beauty in Europe. More than sixty small and bigger gorges, easy
or difficult of access, are situated in the Prefecture of Chania, and that is
why the city is often called “the Locus of Gorges”.
These gorges, with their wild beauty and unpolluted environment stir
strong emotions of awe and wonderment. The passage of one of these gorges offers
unforgettable experiences and certainly makes you wish to cross another gorge
during a next visit in Chania.
Apart from its wilderness and beauty, Chania presents a number of
other interests also: legends about dragons and fairies, about good and bad spirits
that dwell in the gorges. There are limpid water sources or picturesque Byzantine
churches in such places where famous oracles or pantheons formerly took place.
There are heroic stories about the rebels who, from the gorges, drove
the Roman, Arab, Venetian, Turkish or Nazi invaders out of the Cretan land. Tragic
stories as well, about battles and about thousands of women and children who found
refuge from the aggressors in these gorges, and many other stories.
If you look more attentively, you will distinguish the vestiges of
the people who used to live in the gorges: sheepcotes, water mills and hydro-saws,
lime or coal furnaces, guardhouses erected for defense against the various incursions,
and many other things.
These gorges were mainly formed on carbonic rock beds, i.e. limestone,
marbles and dolomites, as a result of a deep fissure in the earth’s crust and
the corrosive activity of the waters of the rivers. They were formed about 14
million years ago, at the end of the Miocene period of the Cainozoic century.
(Text: Antonis Plymakis)
This text (extract) is cited February 2004 from the Chania
Prefecture Tourism Committee tourist pamphlet.
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