Shipyards in the Valley

Η Valley is a seaside fishing village in Argolida three km west of Kranidi and is essentially its port, the port that connected until the 1960s, the Hermione with Nafplio until the road axis Epidaurus - Kranidi is created.

While the Porto HeliThe CostaThe Hermione, are the well-known resorts that attract the publicity and the tourist interest of the famous but also ordinary visitors, the small Valley avoids the spotlights because apart from the natural humility, it has a certainty and another way to be sought after. There are three reasons: Its famous hulls which have been built in its historic Carnagia and plow all the seas of the Aegean. The Franghthi Cave, where some of the most important findings of prehistoric man in Greece were found, and which places it in a prominent position in the scientific community. Finally, all the boats of at least Ermionida overwinter in two large modern shipyards and so most of their owners spend a lot of time in the Valley watching their repair work.

Just before the port of the Valley and opposite the island of Koronida which belongs to the Lebanese shipping family you will meet the shipyards, a large area along the beach, which in winter looks like a forest of hundreds of deciduous tree trunks - the masts of sailboats that have gone ashore for the winter.

With the word Carnagio of Venetian origin, or shipyard In Turkish, the parts of the seashore in ports or coves are characterized, which due to their small slope allow the lifting and launching of boats, in order to undergo the annual works such as caulking, clapping, painting, etc.

And if now the largest number of boats are plastic and much less wooden - and most of the work is maintenance and repair, A few years ago, the famous boats-trachentaries of the Valley were built on the carnagas. From the time of the National Polygenesis when Kranidi had its fleet, like the opposite islands of Hydra and Spetses, the naval and construction tradition was great and continued to this day. In the two shipyards, - the traditional one Lekka shipyard and the most modern of Basimakopoulos - over 1000 boats have been built in the last fifty years and in fact the last large wooden boats of Greece were built here.

It is worth visiting them and watching the work done in them, to see the traditional machines of the shipbuilding art and the way the boats are still built with the two methods, the method of the trail or the method of the shipbuilding hall, where shipbuilder before cutting the crooked wood designs them on a scale of 1: 1.

Then how the frame is formed (the frame, the legs, the arches and the crooks) and then the skin of the frame, the blanket (deck) and the spirals (creation of superstructures).