The beach is the reason most people come, but the villages above it are the reason many of them come back. They are built of stone and slate on a mountainside of extraordinary greenery, and each has a square, a church and a particular character its neighbours do not share.
Here is what is worth your afternoon, starting with the village directly above us.
Mouresi
Our own village, and the main one of the municipality. It is small and green, with a panoramic view across to Kissos, Agios Dimitrios and Agios Ioannis, and a beautiful square shaded by three huge lime trees. The church is Agia Triada.
The whole area around it is well supplied with tavernas, small guesthouses and market gardens selling flowers. House Filitsa is here.
Tsangarada and Kissos
Tsangarada spreads down the hillside towards the Aegean in four communities, each named after a saint, almost submerged in vegetation. It is one of the largest and best organised of the Pelion resorts, with serious restaurants and guesthouses, and visitors who return to the same place for decades.
Kissos is the highest village in east Pelion, hidden in wild but tranquil greenery. Its church of Agia Marina, on the square, has a three-aisled basilica plan and is regarded as one of the finest of its kind on the mountain.
Anilio and Xourichti
Anilio is the gateway to the Mouresi region if you come over the mountain road via Hania. Its name means sunless, from how rarely it sees the winter sun behind its ridge. Below it is Plaka beach.
Xourichti is the other gateway, sitting on a plateau at the head of the Koutra ravine, the deepest on the mountain. The road there winds like a stone snake. Limnionas, the beach below it, is beautiful and still almost undeveloped.
Zagora
The largest village on Pelion, about 47km north-east of Volos, made up of four neighbourhoods on the green slopes. It grew rich in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on silk and textiles shipped out of the harbour at Chorefto.
That wealth paid for the Ellinomouseio, the village school, whose library still holds more than 18,000 titles including rare manuscripts. Rigas Velestinlis, the hero of the 1821 War of Independence, was schooled there. Buy the preserved fruit made by the womens agricultural cooperative before you leave.
Volos
The city at the head of the gulf, about an hour and a half away, and the place to go for a museum and a proper day out. The Archaeological Museum, the Neolithic settlements at Sesklo and Dimini, and a seafront lined with cafés where the local habit is ouzo with small plates.
Ask us for directions, a taverna, or the right day to go. We have lived here a long time.
