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Greece

Seven Villages Trail nr. 6 – aroundtrip from Kourounochori

We drove to Kourounochori and parked just outside the village. It was quiet in the village and we didn`t met anyone. We followed the Seven Villages Trail from alltrails, and it was good marked everywhere.

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Right after the village it was a lot of oranges, and Astor picked some.

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We walked through farmers land, here with the village in the background.

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Kourounochori

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On the other side of the valley can you see the village of Melanes. The aroundtrip will end up there.

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Nice painting on a house.

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We came to a restaurant (closed for the season) wit a lot of cats outside. It was both cats and kittens and we stayed there for a while.

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Most of them was very cozy.

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Specially this one. It was hard to leave them. A bit further on the trail we saw a sign that said that the kittens are ready to go if you wanted to take them.

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I am glad Astor says no to bring cats to the boat, because if not we would have a problem. There are som many of them out there…

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It was outside this restaurant we met them, it would be nice to walk here in the summer and have a lunchstop at this place. We walked here later and then a lady came with food to the cats, it was nice to see.

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The trail is really nice and we walked through different kinds of grounds.

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A donkey

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Easy to follow the trail!

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And beautiful views everywhere.

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Beautiful flowers!

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***

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After we came to the parking place for the Flerio Melanes Kouros we met another cat and he followed us around. He was so beautiful, the colour was amazing!

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He followed us from the parking to the Kouros.

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OMG!! He is so beautiful!!

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The Kouros of Flerio is 4.7 metre long statue of white Naxian marble, located in a village garden in Melanes. It is dated around 570 BC.

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You can see up to the marble quarry in the mountain.

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You have to walk a litle bit further to reach the next kouros. Here is the leg of the other Kouros, Kouros of Faranga.

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And here is the kouros.

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We follow the alltrail app, but here it says that we should walk back to the parking place for the kouros. We saw there was another trail from here and this was marked so we walked this. We met the other trail from the parking a bit later.

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Mushroom

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After walking some kilometers without seeing other people we arrived at Ano Potamia were we have been before.

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The trail was still good marked.

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And from Ano Potamia via Meso Potamia to Kato Potamia we walked along a small creek, but it looked like a river because of all the rain. We met a musk duck.

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He was very interested in what Astor had in his hand. Hungry?

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Some places the leaves stopped the water so we help picking it away to let the water flow better.

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This was a really beautiful part of this trail, lush and green. I guess it is a lot of flower here in the spring.

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Big leaves!

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A lot of work has been done here many years ago.

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The last village, Kato Potamia. We started to get hungry, but the supermarket we saw on the map was closed. So we ate an orange before heading up the hill to Melanes.

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We followed the track showed on alltrails.com and from Kato Potamia we followed the main road a while, until we went up the hill on the right side. We walked through a farm with goats and a barking dog. I guess the trail was overgrown outside the farm, so it was hard to find it.

After a while we came up to Kalamitsia Monastery, build by the Jesuit Monk Roberto Sauze in 1673. The monastery was established to serve as a Jesuit monks’ summer resort, but it passed into the hands of other Catholic orders after some years.

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It was still in a good condition and it was interesting to walk around inside the ruins.

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From Kalamitsa it was a short distance to Melanes (to the left) and back to our car in Kourounochori (to the right) We had a plan to have lunch in Melanes because someone told us there was some open restaurants, but everything was closed. So we walked through the village back to our car.

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Christmas decorations at the bus stop with Christmas music. (watch the video)

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From Melanes it was downhill and then uphill again to the car so I was very tired at the end.

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12 km and 4,5 hours!

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A video from this amazing hike:

In our next post we continue exploring the island!

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