The waterfalls of Karpathos 2019

Over the last few years I haven’t seen much water streaming anywhere during the summer. It’s simply to hot for the water to manage to not dry out. Karpathos has always showed me its beautiful dry river beds but very rarely I would see a little puddle of water there. It was during the summer of ’15 when I was walking from Olympos to Diafani on the dry riverbed and noticed lots of wasps flying close to the ground. They were swarming above a tiny pool of water and it wouldn’t be long before this water disappeared due to the heat. This winter I’m getting a feeling that we will see lots of puddles during the summer. I’m hoping the streams will at least last for a while.

Two weeks ago we drove up to the North of Karpathos and as we are driving on the East side of the island we hear a loud noise of water falling down close to Apella. There is plenty of water from the top to the bottom of the mountain. As we drive past the viewpoint of Apella a big waterfall appears on our left. I have never seen such a waterfall here before!

A few days later we were walking from Othos down to Pigadia. This walk starts at the highest located village of Karpathos at 510 meters above sea level. We are walking through the beautiful nature and again we hear the sound of water falling. We approach a stream and it is deep enough to fill up a bucket of water. We drink from the stream which I can almost call a river and wash our faces with this cold water as we go on further. Then there it is – a gorgeous waterfall again.

Last week we went for a hike to the Limniotis Cave, close to Achata beach and guess what we found. You know, another waterfall! This time it was in a gorge that is already impressive to look at because of the steep walls. Now there is water running through it and we even found a little natural pool!

Water is everywhere and this is also not so strange with the amount of rain Karpathos has had this winter. Perhaps it will be a very green summer with lots of flowers and hopefully we get to keep the waterfalls and the streams.

Cheers, Renate