Balkan bounty: the little-known corner of Greece now ripe for walkers and nature tourism

The Guardian

a day ago

I'm on a steadily rising road in northern Greece as swallows sweep over the burnished grasses to either side of me and pelicans spiral through the summer sky. Gaining height, the land thickens with oak forests and a Hermann's tortoise makes a slow, ceremonial turn on to a sheep track at the edge of the asphalt. And then, just as the road briefly levels out before corkscrewing down the other side, a glittering lake appears beneath me – a brilliant blue eye set in a socket of steep mountains. I can't even begin to count how many times I've crossed the pass into the Prespa basin on my way home from trips into town, but the sight of shimmering Lesser Prespa Lake – often striking blue in the afternoons and silvery at sunset – takes me back to the summer of 2000 when I saw it for the first time.
A little over 25 years ago, my wife and I read a glowing review of a book about the Prespa lakes region. In the north-west corner of Greece and an hour's drive from the towns of Florina and Kastoria, the two Prespa lakes straddle the borders of Greece, Albania and North Macedonia in a basin of about 618 sq miles. We'd never heard of Prespa until then, but the review of Giorgos Catsadorakis's Prespa: A Story for Man and Nature got us thinking about a holiday there, imagining a week or two of walking in the mountains, birding around the summer shores and enjoying food in village tavernas at night.
When the book finally arrived at our London flat, at a time when we were talking seriously about living somewhere else, it took just a single evening (and, to be fair, a couple of bottles of wine) to decide to leave the city behind. Not for a holiday, but to try to make a home for ourselves in the Prespa national park. Twenty-five years later, we're still in the village we moved to – Agios Germanos.
I park the car near the pass and walk further into the hills on a path worn smooth by shepherds and their animals. It's high summer and there's a languor to the landscape. Clouds of butterflies drift on the hot air and a hoopoe raises its magnificent crest in an oak. From up here I can now see Great Prespa Lake as well, separated from its smaller neighbour by a wide and sandy isthmus. These two ancient lakes, thought to be in the region of 3-5 million years old, are almost entirely encircled by a bowl of mountains, making it feel a world apart when you cross into the basin. Although the water levels in the lakes have dropped significantly because of climate change in recent decades, Prespa remains a place of extraordinary vitality.
Looking north over the rolling oak forests, I can see the rough point in the lake where Greece, Albania and North Macedonia meet. Prespa is a crossroads not only of countries but of geologies too, resulting in an extraordinary profusion and abundance of wild species – almost three times as many butterfly species (172) can be found on the Greek side of Prespa than in the whole of the UK (59).
I look up as a mixed group of Dalmatian and great white pelicans lowers towards Lesser Prespa Lake. Seeing these birds in flight, carried across the mountains on wings that can have a total span of more than three metres, it feels as if you have been given a glimpse into the age of the dinosaurs. Until we read the book that brought us here, I had no idea that pelicans could even be found in Greece, let alone nest on these lakes in large numbers, but then Prespa is full of surprises. In some winters, Lesser Prespa Lake can freeze solid enough to walk across – and there are far more brown bears in the region than bouzoukis. While Prespa is a popular winter destination for Greek visitors, in part because of a ski-centre halfway between Florina and the basin, it's the quieter spring and summer seasons when the place comes into its own for walking and nature tourism.
There's a mosaic of cultural riches to explore here too: the remarkable ruins of the 1,000-year-old Byzantine basilica on the island of Agios Achilleios; the lakeside cliffs on Great Prespa Lake, studded with centuries-old hermitages and monastic cells, reached by hiring a boatman from the fishing village of Psarades; the churches screened by sacred groves of immense juniper trees, found on some of the many marked walking trails.
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Besides the abundant nature and mountain walking that prompted us to move here, what also makes this place so special is the food and hospitality. There are welcoming, family-run guesthouses in many of the villages and excellent tavernas serving regional specialities, including slow-baked beans in a rich tomato sauce with oregano, fresh carp and sardine-sized tsironia from the lake, grilled florinela cheese brushed with red pepper marmalade, and wild greens called horta doused in lemon juice and olive oil.
I stop to watch the cross-hatchings of light on the lakes as the hum of insects deepens with the heat. A short-toed eagle turns into the wind ahead of me, briefly motionless as it hunts for snakes in the forest clearings. Then it steers northwards and away across the mountains. Beyond those peaks encircling Prespa are the beautiful, traditional market towns of Korҫë in Albania and Bitola in North Macedonia, which, together with Florina and lakeside Kastoria just outside the basin in Greece, help make the entire region one of endless fascination for me.
There are plans to re-open the long-closed crossing between Greece and North Macedonia within the Prespa basin in the next few years, an opportunity to build further bridges between communities and make movement for tourists easier. Another project will establish a cross-border walking route between our village and the neighbouring mountain village of Brajčino in North Macedonia; it will celebrate the cultural and natural heritage of the common watershed while highlighting the importance of low-impact tourism to local economies, particularly at a time when climate change is making itself felt around the lakes and threatening agricultural livelihoods.
It's almost time to return along the path and head home, but first I sit in the shade of an oak, its leaves rustling in the warm breeze. A steel-blue dragonfly unzips the air and I can hear sheep bells somewhere in the hills. The sound shifts and swirls, just as on the saint's day festivals of summer, called panigyria, when the wild, soaring music of clarinets and raucous Balkan brass rises into the mountain nights as people gather with food and drink to circle-dance in village squares.
I've never thought of Prespa as anything but a shared place, where human cultures and wild species come together and co-exist, a place best experienced slowly and with care. And although Prespa has been my home for a quarter of a century now, when I see that blue water glimmering beneath me as I cross the pass, it still so often feels like the first time.For more information visit Society for the Protection of Prespa and Visit Prespes
Julian Hoffman is the author of Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece published by Elliott & Thompson (£18.99). To support the Guardian order a copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply