Voreia Pindos

The Εθνικό Πάρκο Βόρειας Πίνδου was declared in 2005 under the framework of Law 1650/1986, and with a core zone of 1,462.59 square kilometres and a peripheral zone of 483.87 more it is the largest terrestrial national park in Greece by a long way. It was assembled rather than founded. The boundary was drawn around two national forests that already existed — Pindos of 1966 and Vikos–Aoös, declared by presidential decree in August 1973 — which survive inside it as core zones, together with eleven wildlife refuges and eleven Natura 2000 sites. What resulted covers the northern third of the range Greeks call the spine of the country, and its high point is Smolikas, the highest mountain in Greece after Olympus at a little over 2,630 metres.

Two quite different rocks share the park. Tymfi is Palaeocene–Eocene limestone, with Campanian and Jurassic dolomite exposed on its northern scarp and flysch — sandstone and siltstone — on the lower slopes, and water has done the predictable thing to the limestone: the Vikos gorge runs about twenty kilometres, twelve of them through the old core zone, with walls approaching a thousand metres, and Guinness listed it as the deepest in the world in proportion to its width, a title other gorges have been disputing ever since. For most of its length the gorge bed is dry white boulders, the drainage having gone underground through the porous rock. The Voidomatis becomes a permanent river only at the northern end, where springs at the village of Vikos deliver it fully formed at an average temperature no higher than four degrees, and it runs fifteen kilometres in all before reaching the Aoös near Konitsa. Smolikas, north across the Aoös, is ophiolite — ocean floor obducted onto the continent — and was glaciated in the Pleistocene, its last ice gone some 11,500 years ago. Each massif carries a Drakolimni, a dragon lake: Tymfi's sits at 2,000 metres and is a hectare across and just under five metres deep, Smolikas's at around 2,200. Both hold alpine newts, and the story locally is of two dragons throwing rocks at one another across the valley.

Zagori, the district along the park's southern flank, held a form of self-government under Ottoman rule from 1431, when a treaty with Sinan Pasha granted the privileges known as the Voiniko; the Koinon of the Zagorisians ran its affairs through a council of elders until the privileges were rescinded in 1868. Money remitted by merchants abroad went into stone: forty-six villages roofed with slabs laid dry and held down by nothing but the weight of the courses above, and more than a hundred and sixty arched packhorse bridges built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of which the three-arched Kalogeriko near Kipoi is the one everyone photographs. Vradeto, the highest of the villages at 1,340 metres, was reached only by the Skala, a stairway of roughly a thousand stone steps zigzagging up a ravine from Kapesovo, until a road arrived in the 1970s; the 2021 census counted twenty-two residents. A 1986 study of Zagori's toponymy found about an eighth of the place names Aromanian, left by Vlach shepherds moving flocks between summer and winter pasture and clearly concentrated in the north and east — Valia Calda, the warm valley, is their name for the 1966 park and has outlasted the Greek one. UNESCO inscribed the Zagori Cultural Landscape in 2023.

The park holds brown bears and wolves, Balkan chamois on the Tymfi crags and otters in the rivers; the stream draining Valia Calda is the Arkoudorema, bear stream, and a proposal to divert it for a hydroelectric scheme has hung over the valley for years. The Aoös rises near Vovousa, runs eighty kilometres in Greece and another hundred and ninety-two in Albania as the Vjosa, which on 15 March 2023 became Europe's first wild river national park. The protection stops at the frontier: on the Greek side a dam has impounded the Aoös springs at 1,350 metres since 1987.

What's worth knowing before you go

Ioannina is the base — 260 kilometres from Thessaloniki on the Egnatia Odos and 410 from Athens on the Ionia Odos, with an airport four kilometres from the centre and Aegean flights from Athens, the only scheduled route it has. Hire a car; bus service into the villages is thin, and the park is large enough that Konitsa for Smolikas and Vovousa for Valia Calda are different days entirely. Monodendri and the two Papingo villages, at 958 metres, are where most people sleep. Late May to June and late September into October are the months: the Astraka refuge at 1,950 metres runs from May to October, snow lies on Tymfi well into June, and in July and August the gorge traverse is genuinely hot with no running water in the bed to help. Winter ices the approaches to Papingo and Vradeto.

Time the gorge so you finish at the northern mouth on a hot afternoon. You come down the old zigzag path from Vikos village having looked at nothing but dry white stone all the way, and the Voidomatis emerges from the rock in front of you full-sized and at four degrees, as though it had been running all along somewhere out of sight.