Day 15: Crete’s Botanical Gardens

Trip

Greece+Cyprus 2025

Location

Crete 🇬🇷

Date

September 27, 2025

It’s a checkout day. It means we need an alarm clock again. Granted it was at a way more reasonable 10:00, but still, it’s the principle that counts. If you’re not sure which principle I’m referring too you haven’t been paying attention to my multiple complaints about having to get up at a set time when I’m on vacation. I would suggest you read back a couple of chapters of this trip or re-evaluate your reading comprehension.

We began the day with breakfast at 📍Drops. They performed at an acceptable level yesterday and I felt like going for a safe bet. I repeated the baked eggs in tomatoe sauce with sausage plate from yesterday and Karine went for the peanut butter French toast, surprisingly (but realistically) in the dessert section of the menu. Again both good execution of the respective dish. We were happy.

From our breakfast we grabbed the car at the super efficient parking. We made our way to the 📍Botanical Garden of Crete. Karine and I are both amazed that it’s our first botanical garden of the trip. We usually do one per major location we visit. It turned out to be a good one too. It’s a 2.5km one-way trail down and up a cliff with a small animal section at the bottom (ducks, geese, peacocks and two donkeys). Plenty of flowers and a large number of fruit trees. The path is shaded with abundant information panels. This is one of the better gardens we’ve visited! We were surprised by the large volume of flowers considering how late we are in the season.

To round out the botanical portion of our day, we headed to the Ancient Olive Tree of Vouves. The tree is estimated to be between 3,000 and 4,000 years old. It is one of the oldest olive trees in the world and still produces olives today. Its exact age is difficult to determine because the heartwood has been lost making tree ring analysis impossible. It has protected natural monument status and is rightly seen as a symbol of Crete’s long-standing olive cultivation heritage. All that means, contrary to our previous old olive tree visit: it deserved a paved, if narrow, road to it and a dedicated cafe/taverna right next to it. The tree itself is also majestic and worth the quick detour we made to meet it.

We made the rest of the journey to Paleochora quite easily if a little unnerved by the amount of noise the car is making. We’re revising our plans for tomorrow as not to use the car until we have to bring it back to the airport and catch our flight to Cyprus.

Paleochora is the quintessential beach town. It’s the tip of a small peninsula giving it beaches on both sides of town. Most of its restaurants operate a beach bar and sun chair service of some sort. We’re staying three nights and our host at the 📍EYTYXHS Studios was delicately asking us if we had plans. She was relieved that we had a car so we could go places and very happy to know we already had plans that included doing the Samariá Gorges. She didn’t go as far as saying it but there‘s nothing to do here other than being on a beach. And that is perfect.

We cleared out our laundry backlog then headed out to 📍Jetee, the likely contender beach bar where we’ll land tomorrow. The fact that it has good reviews and is on the sandy beach side of the peninsula helped steer our choice towards it. While having our glass of wine and chilling as the sun goes down on the horizon, I noticed the other unadvertised particularity of Paleochora at this time of year: it’s going through the retiree season. Almost everybody at the beach bar is of retirement age and most people we ran into on the street were also of retirement age. But the best feature in our books is the amount of healthy and old cats!

Our dinner was at 📍Palm Tree Bar Cafe. Like all the places in town, it’s impossible to reserve here online. Karine used our tried and true, stop by and asked for a reservation and we were offered one the very same day at 21:00. The meal itself was good. We went for the rooster and rabbit mains and enjoyed both. Everything else had a cheese connection. The Greek salad? of course there’s cheese in that. Then there’s the pies filled with greens (spinash/swiss chard greens) and, to compensate for the greens, cheese. The sweet potatoe bites? A chunk of sweet potatoe, roasted and covered with two different kinds of cheese. The fries with the rooster? Covered with cheese obviously. We had a lot of cheese to Karine’ delight.