Crete is not an island with mountains: it is a mountain range with coastlines

The first time anyone looks at a map of Crete they see a long, narrow island and assume it is a small place you can cover in a couple of days. The width figures back that up: twelve kilometres from sea to sea at the Ierapetra isthmus, sixty across the thickest stretch. By car that looks like nothing.

Then you try to cross it and the clock refuses to agree. The reason is that the map only shows two of the place's three dimensions. Inside those sixty kilometres there are two thousand four hundred metres of climb and as many of descent, and the road has to negotiate them bend by bend.

01 The proportion that explains everything

Crete is not an island that happens to have mountains the way a place has a bit of relief. It is an entire mountain range showing above the water, and what you see is the part that stayed above sea level. The six mountain groups follow one another from west to east with barely a break: Lefka Ori, Psiloritis, Dikti, Kedros, Thrypti and Asterousia.

The first two set the scale. Psiloritis, in the centre, reaches 2,456 metres and is the island's highest point; the Lefka Ori, in the west, stop three metres short at 2,453, but gather thirty summits above 2,000. Dikti, further east, reaches 2,148.

Put the two figures side by side and the proportion jumps out. From the northern sea to the southern sea, across the Ierapetra narrows, is twelve kilometres. From the shore to the top of the Lefka Ori is two and a half kilometres of height. The island is almost as tall as it is wide, and that is not an island: it is a mountain with a beach around it.

Everything else follows from there. Where the water falls, where it runs down, where there is flat ground, where a road fits and where it does not, what can be grown and in which month. Grasp that proportion and Crete stops being a catalogue of separate sights and becomes a system.

02 Water goes south through the cracks

On an island shaped like this, rain falls high up and has to reach the sea somehow. Since the southern flank is the short, steep one, the water forces its way down it by cutting the rock vertically. The result is the most recognisable feature of the Cretan landscape: the gorges.

The best known is Samaria, which begins at Xyloskalo, 1,250 metres up, and ends sixteen kilometres lower on the shore of the Libyan Sea. At its tightest stretch, the one they call the Gates, the walls rise almost three hundred metres and the passage narrows to four metres across. It has been a national park since 1962.

Samaria is the longest, but it is not an isolated case. Imbros, Kourtaliotiko, Ha, Richtis and dozens more answer to the same mechanism, which is why they cluster on the southern and western flanks, the ones that take the most water and drop the fastest.

One practical consequence is worth keeping. A gorge is a watercourse. You walk it when it carries no water, and you do not walk it when it does. That is not an administrative decision; it is the physical reason almost all of them close in winter.

03 The villages the road never reaches

On the south-western coast the mountain drops straight into the water and leaves no flat strip. Where there is no flat strip there is no road, and where there is no road there are villages that still depend on the boat. Loutro and Agia Roumeli are the two clearest cases: they have no road access and can only be reached by sea or on foot.

This is not a tourist eccentricity or a conservation decision: it is geometry. Crete's coastline measures 1,046 kilometres and along this stretch it runs right at the foot of the Lefka Ori. Putting a road there would mean hanging it off the wall, and it was never done.

What exists instead is a boat line joining Chora Sfakion, Loutro, Agia Roumeli, Sougia and Paleochora. That boat is not an excursion: it is the road. It carries people, goods and, as the photograph shows, even the refuse truck.

04 The plains are up high

The other effect of this relief is counter-intuitive. In most places the flat ground is at the bottom and the mountains stand around it. Crete does have notable plains, but several of the best sit wedged between summits, hundreds of metres up: the enclosed plateaus of Lasithi, Omalos and Nida.

An enclosed plateau works like a basin with no outlet: water comes in, fine soil settles on the floor, and good farmland forms where you would expect rock. That is why they are fertile and why they are inhabited, even at an altitude where it snows in winter.

For a traveller this changes how you plan. Going up to Lasithi or Omalos is not a mountain excursion in the usual sense: it is arriving at a flat, farmed, inhabited place that happens to sit at twelve hundred metres. Neither the landscape nor the temperature resembles the coast you left an hour earlier.

05 Two climates separated by a wall

The range also acts as a weather barrier, and the figures make it plain. Chania, in the north-west, gets 614.7 millimetres of rain a year. Heraklion, on the central north coast, gets 433.2. Ierapetra, in the south-east, gets 474.5. The water is shared out from west to east, not from north to south.

What does change between the two flanks is sunshine and winter. Ierapetra, the only town of any size on the south coast, records more than 3,100 hours of sun a year, an annual mean of 19.9 degrees and a winter mean of 12.9. Chania, on the other shore, does not reach 2,814 hours of sun.

That difference has a very visible economic translation. Around Ierapetra there are some fifteen square kilometres of plastic greenhouses, and the district lives off winter growing: there the farming season does not stop when it stops everywhere else.

Up above, the opposite happens. Snow falls regularly on the summits between November and April, even though it is rare on the coast. Which means that on the same day, half an hour apart by car, there can be greenhouses producing tomatoes and snow lying on the ground. That is the real range of the place.

06 An island inside the island

There is one last effect, and it is the one that says most about how long this system has been running. Crete holds around two thousand plant species, and close to ten per cent of them grow naturally nowhere else in the world.

The explanation is the usual one. An island cuts species off from the mainland; a mountain range inside that island also cuts one set of slopes off from another. Each massif, each enclosed plateau and each gorge works as a compartment with its own altitude, its own aspect and its own humidity.

Hence the talk of islands inside the island. And hence, to finish where we started, the fact that distances mislead: crossing from one to another is not covering kilometres on a map, it is climbing and descending a wall. Plan Crete by flanks, stay on one, and leave the other for another trip.