The Region
The area of Menalon is located in Arcadia, in the heart of the Peloponnese, the richest region in history and landscapes of Greece. Dozens of villages, some of them located on the “legs” of the forest, some other in the perimeter of fertile basins and other at the outlets of large headlands, define the volume of the mountain, which rises almost 1000 m. above the vast Arcadian upland and already around 1000 m above sea level. A complex place and naturally fragmented, central Arcadia carved with tenacity by humans for thousands of years and reached nowadays embellished with any historical or landscapes reference ever flourished in the Mediterranean: every aspect of the natural scenery, states and traditional isolated houses, citadels and hermitages, tanks and bridges, gunpowder mills and threshing floors, clearings and fountains springing up continuously until the pencil and the eye gets tired by its registrations. Among all these, an endless network of trails ascends, descends, turns like a snake and anastomosed in the meadows and saddles. The largest organized path in Greece, the Menalon Trail, was carved on this terrain.