Pelion
Pelion is a peninsula that runs east-south from Volos in central Greece, with a high pine and beech ridge through the middle and two coasts of completely different temperament. The western slopes face the sheltered Pagasetic Gulf and have the calmer swimming and the orchards. The eastern slopes drop into the open Aegean and have the harder weather, the better walks, and the more dramatic beaches. The mythological detail is that the centaurs lived here and Chiron, the wise one, tutored Achilles, Asclepius, and Jason in a cave above the eastern coast. None of the cave is reliably identified.
The villages are the architectural reason to come. Makrinitsa, Tsagarada, Vizitsa, and Milies sit on stone slopes between five and seven hundred metres up, and the family houses are archontika — three-storey stone-and-timber mansions with painted ceilings, slate roofs, and small flagged courtyards, a number now run as small guesthouses. Walk the kalderimia, the stone-paved mule paths, between villages: the most rewarding short link is Tsagarada down to the Damouchari coast.
The eating ritual is the tsipouradiko: a glass of the local house-distilled tsipouro arrives with a small plate of meze, and another glass and another plate every twenty minutes for as long as you sit. It is the working lunch of the region, not a tourist set-piece. Volos, on the way in, has the best concentration of tsipouradika in mainland Greece.
The four-season detail is true. Spring is wildflowers and full streams; summer is the eastern beaches and the cooler villages above them; autumn is apples, walnuts, and the year's tsipouro distilling; winter is snow on Mount Pelion and the small ski station at Agriolefkes. Pelion is rare in being defensible at any time of year. Three nights minimum, four if you intend to walk.
House Notes
The Moutzouris
The Moutzouris, the narrow-gauge steam train of Pelion — fifteen kilometres on one of the world's narrowest tracks (60 centimetres) from Ano Lechonia up to Milies in ninety minutes, with a fifteen-minute stop at Ano Gatzea. The line's engineer was Evaristo de Chirico, father of the painter Giorgio, who was born in Volos and pinned his early imagery to the arched stone bridges his father built. Summer service from Ano Lechonia in the morning.
The plane tree
On the central square of Tsagarada at Agia Paraskevi, the plane tree the village grew around — fourteen metres of trunk diameter, around a thousand years old, predating the 1719 church beside it. The branches are now carried on a marble column because the village bell, once hung from them, pulled the limbs down with its weight. The cafés keep their tables in the shade beneath.
Damouchari
On the eastern coast at Mouresi, Damouchari — the safest natural harbour on the eastern Pelion shore, two coves separated by a rocky peninsula on which the ruins of a medieval castle still stand. The nineteenth-century customs house, the warehouses, and the captains' mansions come from the period when the Zagorian fleet sheltered here. The 2008 Mamma Mia 'Dancing Queen' sequence was filmed on the jetty between the coves.
The address
12 Months Luxury Resort, on the green slopes above Tsagarada — built in the Pelion mountain register of stone, slate, and timber, set in the dense forest on the east of the ridge. The thousand-year-old plane tree is the next square down; the kalderimi to Damouchari runs from below the hotel. Year-round operation, in a region whose seasons each ask a different kind of stay.
The Zagora apple
Mila Zagoras Piliou, the Starking Delicious cultivar grown on the upper-east of the mountain at Zagora, Makrirahi, and Pouri — registered under the European Commission's protected designation. The Agricultural Cooperative of Zagora, founded in 1916, is one of the oldest cooperatives in Greece; it now packs ten to fifteen thousand tonnes a year through one of the larger sorting houses of the Balkans.
The Athanasakeion
The Athanasakeion Archaeological Museum of Volos, opened in 1909 — a neoclassical museum financed by Alexios Athanassakis, a merchant of Portaria who built it and gave it to the state. The Sesklo and Dimini Neolithic finds are the core of the collection (the two prehistoric settlements lie just to the west of the city), and the outdoor garden carries reconstructions of the Neolithic houses themselves.
Trikeri
At the southernmost tip of Pelion, Trikeri — founded in the seventeenth century by islanders fleeing pirate raids, and by 1821 holder of one of the largest merchant fleets in Greece. The traditional shipyard at Agia Kyriaki, on the western edge of the settlement, continues the shipbuilding line of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; sailing ships were built here. Designated a protected traditional village in 1967.
Mylopotamos
Six kilometres below Tsagarada on the open Aegean side, Mylopotamos — a double cove divided by a rock with a natural arch through which the sea passes between the bays. Two atmospheres: the organised side with the beach bar, the quieter side with a sea cave that holds the shade through the middle of the day. The descent from the car park above is a steep paved staircase; come early to claim the further cove.
Kavouras
Kavouras, on Hatziargyri Street in central Volos — one of the oldest of the city's tsipouradika, a kafenio of the older register where the bottle is light and the plates come from the morning catch. The quiet end of the long Volos lunch, not the line of tables at the harbour. The proper introduction to the practice the city built its afternoons on.
Iolcus
Iolcus, at the Volos Kastro hill on the city's western edge — Homer's well-built polis with broad places, beneath Mount Pelion at the head of the Pagasetic Gulf. The legendary launching point of Jason and the fifty Argonauts on the Argo, in quest of the Golden Fleece. The Neolithic settlement of Dimini lies adjacent on the same plain, the country read backwards through three thousand years.