Gift Of The Greeks

In a remote corner of Greece’s Peloponnese region sits the Mani Peninsula, a beautiful slice of mountainous land surrounded by sparkling seas, and held in high regard by those lucky enough to discover it.

- James Spender

There are few better places on Earth to be a cat than Mani. It’s unlikely the felines care much for the local myths or the views, but on this late summer evening in Kardamili, a footnote of a town on Greece’s southernmost appendage, the cats lounge nonchalantly on cafe steps and vacant chairs, picking at scraps left by a table of men playing cards and drinking.

It’s not a bad place to be a cyclist either. Yesterday I went on a brief recce, and within a few clicks from my guesthouse the glistening shoreline had given way to vast limestone cliffs interwoven with a fading tarmac ribbon that traced its way into the mountains. In 14km I’d gone from sea level to over 700m, and but for a puncture on the way down I wouldn’t have encountered a soul in two hours of riding. As it was, an angry hiss from my front wheel curtailed a highly enjoyable descent, and I was forced to stop by a small church, where I encountered Richard, a man of lithe but advancing years coming up the road on a Brompton.

Adhering to the cyclist scouts’ code, Richard pulled over to see if I was OK, and we struck up a conversation. He told me he was from Lancaster but lived on Mani years ago, and explained that until the 1980s there was no proper road connecting the top, which the Greek’s call Exo Mani (outer Mani) with the bottom, Mesa Mani (deep Mani). Instead, the locals had to take boats or ride down old farm tracks on mules.

Richard explained the road we were on was built to service the towns above it, and later another road was added along the coast to circumvent the need to wind through the mountainside to reach the peninsula’s lower regions. Our road became all but redundant, which made it superb for an ‘up and back before breakfast’ – something Richard had done every day of his holiday thus far.