The landscape and stone type on Crete.

The North coast of Crete is hilly with a lot of bays and beaches. The South coast on the other hand has a much rougher look; it looks like the mountains are crashing into the sea. The island of Crete does not have rivers that you can sail along. For a significant part, Crete consists of lime stone. This fragile stone lets water through easily which causes the so called ‘karst’ symptoms. The water dissolves the lime and in this way it creates caves, underground rivers and lakes. Until the Pleistocene (app 1 million years BC) Crete was part of the European land mass and formed a component of a mountain range that connected Europe with Asia.

The island is situated alongside a seismographic active gorge, which shifts the African mainland underneath the European land mass. This has caused Crete to rise and drop several metres over the last ten thousand years. This is also the cause of regular earthquakes that the island experiences.