Freitag, 1. November 2019

Lost Monastery Sotiras

After ending the last day at the harbour of Kótronas we had parked there for the night. The next morning we decided to hike up to the monastery of Sotiras.


For our hikes I use the Rother guide of the Peloponnese, which I had bought in Austria and downloaded the GPS data into the Rother App, which is very helpful. Normally I buy the guide through the App, but not all guides are available as downloads. Following the instructions we took the road through Kótronas and up into the mountains in direction of the Sotiras Monastery.



Little chapel on the way
View into the bay of Kótronas
Reaching the abandoned monastery


In we go!
The chapel of the monastery dates from the 15th century.
Colourful paintings inside the church
From the ceiling parts of the painting are crumbling down


The rest of the monastery is more or less in ruins
Cell of a monk which has a special acoustic
View into the bay
Little arch into the kitchen
Monastery kitchen

For the way back the route led us on an old path which connects a village in the mountains with the harbour. Just that nearly nobody uses this path anymore and it was intensely overgrown. We really had to fight our way through the bushes.

At first the path was quite good ...
... you could see that it was built properly

Soon the path was overgrown ...
... which got worse and worse
But we made it down to the harbour!
The parking at the harbour was free so we supported the local economy by shopping at the little supermarket and visiting the bar at the beach. We also went for a swim at the sandy beach before we finally left Kótronas looking for water to fill our tank again.

Cordy at the spring

We had found a spring where we had to use our pump again to get the water into the tank. We had put a canister under the spring and pumped the water from there as there wasn't much of a basin.



Fresh water again
@ Areópoli

From the east coast we had crossed the Mani again and arrived at Areópoli where we went for lunch before we wandered through the little streets and did some shopping. Nearby was the beach of Neo Itilo, where our next hike will start.


Sunset @ the beach of Neo Itilo
Parking for the night