Arcadia is not a place you tick off. There is no single monument you drive to, photograph and leave. The whole of it is the monument — a mountain province where the road keeps climbing and every turn opens onto something older than the last.
To wander here is the point. The Lousios cuts its gorge between Dimitsana and Stemnitsa with monasteries hanging off the rock. The Menalon Trail links village to village on stone mule tracks that carried salt and grain long before they carried walkers. In the east, the road out of Leonidio climbs to Kosmas through the red cliffs of Parnon. In the southwest, the bed of the old railway runs flat and empty through the Alpheios valley.
None of it is far from anything else. Arcadia is compact — an hour of driving covers a lot of ground and several centuries. What takes time is stopping: the kafeneio in the square, the shepherd who wants to know where you are from, the church that is open because somebody left it open.
That is what we mean by wandering. Not covering ground, but letting the place set the pace.
Where to wander
- The Lousios gorge — Dimitsana to Stemnitsa on foot, past Prodromou, Philosophou and Aimyalon.
- The Menalon Trail — the first Greek path certified as a Leading Quality Trail of Europe, village to village.
- Leonidio to Kosmas — from the sea to the top of Parnon, past the monastery of Elona on its red cliff.
- Agia Theodora at Vasta — a chapel that carries seventeen tall trees on its roof, and a spring beneath it.
- Paradisia to Chranoi — following the bed of the old railway, one of the quietest walks in the valley.
- Karytaina — the castle village that 19th-century travellers called the Toledo of Greece.
- Mount Lykaion — the ash altar of Zeus and the ancient stadium, high above the southwest.
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