Ha Gorge – the cleft in the Thrypti Mountains

Anyone driving across the Isthmus of Ierapetra sees it from a long way off: a vertical notch, as if drawn with a knife, in the mountain wall above the village of Monastiraki. The Ha Gorge (Φαράγγι του Χα), also written Cha, opens at the foot of the Thrypti massif, east of Vasiliki and not far from the plain of Ierapetra. It is between one and one and a half kilometres long, and the walls rise in places for 200 to 400 metres.

The name Χα is probably connected with the Greek verb χάσκω – “to gape, to form a gap”. The terrain could hardly be better described: the broad, stony slope narrows without warning to an all but impassable ravine. At the entrance it is about three metres wide, and inside, in some places, barely thirty centimetres. Local folklore prefers another derivation: an old woman is said to have led Saracen raiders to their deaths in the abyss, and her laughter – “ha, ha, ha” – echoed between the walls.

Ha is regarded as one of the wildest and least accessible gorges in Greece; the sheer cliffs on either side allow no way out once one is inside. In the narrows the water forms cascades and small pools, and the vertical limestone walls preserve a damp microclimate. Rare plants, birds and small animals have found a refuge here that man was never able to exploit; many corners of the canyon are still only partly explored. People did live on its rim, however: a ledge at Katalimata, on the edge of the gorge, was occupied at the end of the Neolithic, between about 4000 and 3000 BC, and the settlement of Chalasmenos close by belongs to the very end of the Bronze Age.

Nature and geology

The gorge formed on a fault in the limestone strata of eastern Crete, the Ierapetra fault, which runs from north-east to south-west and whose scarp divides this end of the island. The fault is still active; it has raised the mountains more than 300 metres relative to the plain, and ever since then the water from the upland of Thrypti has been sawing its way through the edge of the break, so that the same rock formations are exposed on both sides. From a height the deep rent in the massif can be made out clearly, and in the stream bed the marks of the seasonal floods; on the way through, the rock changes several times and lays open the geological history of the island as if in cross-section. The geological variety of the Cretan east, whose natural heritage also includes the Sitia Geopark with its protected caves, gorges, fossils and rare habitats, appears here in dramatic form.

A side branch plunges into the gorge as the “Mastoras” waterfall, over a wall 215 metres high – one of the highest known waterfalls in Greece. It is fed by the springs near the forest settlement of Thrypti and runs on into the spring months, breaking up into spray halfway down; above the point where it joins, the bed of the gorge is often dry, below it there is water in plenty. Birds of prey nest in the walls, among them bearded vultures and golden eagles. Calabrian pine grows on the slopes, and endemic species such as Cretan ebony stand among the rocks.

Visiting and safety

The complete traverse is a technically difficult expedition. It begins at about 520 metres on the edge of the upland, reached by the mountain road from Kato Chorio, and ends 300 metres lower at the white chapel above Monastiraki. Between the two lie 26 abseils, the highest of 32 metres; four to five hours should be allowed. Rope protection, canyoning experience and the company of a qualified guide are indispensable. After heavy rain the rocks become slippery and the water level rises quickly. The ordinary traveller does better to look at Ha from the viewpoints and not to attempt to enter the ravine unprepared: the entrance is reached from Monastiraki in a few minutes on foot, the lowest stretch can be explored without equipment, and a glance into the cleft is enough to grasp the scale of the thing.

The history of its exploration is recent. In June 1987 three mountaineers from Thessaloniki – Stavros Lazaridis, Vlasis Hatzipanagiotou and Chronis Amatzidis – climbed through the gorge from bottom to top in a climb lasting several days; the first organised abseil descent, in which bolts were placed and the route surveyed, followed on 21 February 2002, and Cretan speleological clubs have since equipped it with fixed anchors. When persons unknown removed almost all the anchor points in March 2009, an Italian party was left stranded in the gorge – a warning to enquire into the state of the fixed protection before every descent. The best time is from February to April, when water is flowing and the pools and natural slides are full.

In spite of – or precisely because of – its inaccessibility, the gorge remains one of the most impressive natural monuments of Lasithi. Its value lies not in any development for tourism but in its preserved wildness, the plumb-vertical walls, the water of the rainy season and the rare vegetation.