Vikos, Greece

People don’t often think of Greece as a wilderness, but bears still range through the wooded Vikos in the Pindus mountains of the north-west, and groups of wild boar run amuck through its forests. At 20km in length, 1,600 metres deep and with its straight sections topped with uniform limestone precipices, this is an unmistakable canyon. Monodendri makes an excellent starting point and Vikos village a good terminus for a hike that will probably take about six hours. The done thing on arrival in the picturesque stone village of Monodendri is to arrange a taxi to pick you up from Vikos at the end of the day. Driving above the gorge is rewarding, too, with several superb viewpoints, such as the Oxia and Ay Paraskevi monastery, a short walk from Monodendri. At Vikos a path leads down to the ice-cold river where it’s possible to swim. Like a lot of these gorges, after rainfall the danger level from slippery rocks and swollen rivers increases exponentially, and apart from in summer all visitors should pay attention to weather forecasts.

Matka, Macedonia

Visitors to Skopje who feel they may tire of the city’s kitsch but enjoyable new monuments can head off to the Matka lake and canyon. It is 15km to the south-west of the city and has enough activities to sate the hunger of every outdoor enthusiast: hiking, walks, canoeing, caving, climbing, history, and bird and butterfly spotting. The gorge contains medieval monasteries with superb frescoes and a lot of caves – some are accessible by boat from Lake Matka. The number 60 bus from Skopje takes 40 minutes to get there and costs about 40p, though it is infrequent. Taxis cost around £5. The bus stop is a 15-minute walk from the splendour of Lake Matka, which has restaurants alongside. This is also the starting point of the trail that hugs the gorge and that – although is a comfortable walk – has its hairy moments when handrails disappear and sudden drops loom up. If you are not in hiking mode one of the best things to do at the gorge is to take a boat trip to the water-filled Vrelo cavern with its incredible stalagmites and unchartered depths.

Cava d’Ispica, Sicily

This is more of a gash in a plateau than Sicily’s answer to the Grand Canyon but it’s aesthetically pleasing and quite long, at 13km. It’s between the attractive south-eastern baroque towns of Modica (famous for its grainy chocolate) and Ispica (not famous for anything much) and deserves wider recognition. It’s accessible and quiet; birds of prey wheel constantly above its rock walls looking for the abundant lizards, snakes and small mammals within. What makes the gorge truly unique are the signs of continuous habitation from who-knows-when BC (back to neolithic times apparently) to the mid-20th century in the form of habitable caves, tombs, ancient stairways and churches. At Ispica, take the SP47 road, which winds around the eastern edge of the town, and watch for the signs for the Cava d’Ispica. Pay a few euros at the kiosk for the fenced-off section and the official tour, or park lower down on the hill and walk straight into the floor of the gorge as far as you like.

Saklikent, Turkey

This gorge is in Asia, clearly, but it’s in Turkey’s Muğla province – a hugely popular holiday destination for Europeans, so let’s ignore the technicalities. This is a full-on topographical feature with roaring white water and endless vertical walls: “don’t look up” might be an unusual but appropriate refrain for visitors here. You probably won’t be alone: a well-oiled tourist machine has been built up around this canyon that cuts 18km through mountains (only 4km is walkable) reaching up to 3,000 metres. You can hire special shoes, hard hats (we’ll come to that), be whisked down river on a rubber tube (£2.35 for 30 minutes including minibus journey back) and pre-order lunch … and this is before you’ve left the car park. Close to the entrance to the Saklikent (entry £1.15) a powerful spring has to be forded by holding on to a rope. It’s not advisable for young children because the water reaches at least knee height on adults. Now, about those hard hats: falling rocks, particularly after rain, can be a hazard here; a rare one, but in 2014 there were two deaths in the gorge after flash floods.

Gorges du Verdon, France

Only an hour’s drive north of Fréjus on the Côte d’Azur, you’d think this beautiful place would have been fully appreciated from time immemorial. But much of the canyon was only properly investigated in 1905 by engineers, including Édouard-Alfred Martel (the explorer who made the first descent in to Yorkshire’s Gaping Gill, in 1895), from the local electricity company. Further discoveries were still being made in the 1940s. Nowadays, the gorge and artificial Saint Croix lake are a centre for outdoor pursuits. The most impressive part runs for 25km between the towns of Castellane and Moustiers-Sainte-Marie where the river Verdon has cut a narrow ravine. Visitors can hike the Sentier de l’Imbut, which starts close to the village of Aiguines, on the D71 road. It’s about 8km long and takes four to six hours to walk, passing a 2,000-year-old juniper tree, and places discovered and named by Martel, such as the “river to the underworld”, the Styx.
• net-verdon.com, the official website on the path notes: “We must be very careful in this place, in order not to fall into the river.” The trail can be tricky and it is not advisable to take younger children

Partnach Gorge, Germany

A joyous, easy to visit mini-canyon in the Bavarian Alps. It’s only just over 700 metres long and the walls are a modest but spectacular 80-90 metres. Excellent walkways enable people to visit all-year round, which is a fine thing because the gorge is particularly beautiful in winter when unusual ice formations, including giant icicles, can be seen there. Entry is €4 for adults. Torchlit evening visits are also on offer at the gorge, again magical when there’s a lot of ice. The entrance is a 20-minute stroll away from Garmish-Partenkirchen’s 1936 Winter Olympics stadium. The path, though easy to walk, is narrow and on a busy day you’ll get that filing-slowly-through feeling familiar to visitors to art exhibitions. After exiting the gorge, visitors can walk uphill to a biergarten and cafe. There is a cable car with vintage compartments (the Eckbauerbahn, open daily 9am-4.30pm) to take you back down, or you can walk down the mountainside to the stadium, making a circular route. The overall trip length is four to five hours.

Gola su Gorropu, Sardinia

The lure of Sardinia’s sumptuous sands lead many visitors to overlook the island’s interior charms. But they shouldn’t feel guilty: signposting and access isn’t always straightforward and being a little off the tourist trail there’s not a lot of information. That’s certainly true of this mysterious, dramatic and somewhat isolated cleft in the 1,000-metre Supramonte mountains. It’s an easy car ride from the eastern towns of Dorgali and Cala Gonone but is still a 90-minute hike from the main parking spot at Genna Silana on the SS125 road (jeeps can be arranged there to halve the length of the trek). The spectacular canyon narrows to five metres at points and has 400-metre walls and gives a sense of wilderness not easy to come across on the island. The limestone has at points been sculpted into fantastic curves and contortions by the Flumineddu river and there are swimmable pools of water among the boulders and oleander clumps. Walking more then a few kilometres along the gorge is fairly difficult, due to the terrain, and requires climbing equipment at points. There are guided tours operated by companies such as Ghivine (about €45pp) in Dorgali.
• gorropu.info, sardegna.com

Vintgar, Bled, Slovenia

Bled’s sub-Alpine charms centre mostly on its serene lake surrounded by mountains with the Church of the Assumption perched on its island like a priestly watchtower. Another of its attractions, 4km to the north, is Vintgar (entry €4), a short gorge of 1.6km, close to Podhom village and a great starting of place for walks to viewpoints. Well-constructed walkways take visitors over wooden bridges crossing the fast-flowing Radovna River, and with plenty of viewing galleries it ends with a bridge overlooking the impressive Šum waterfall. After this, the path heads away from the river, uphill to St Catherine’s church from where there are great views. To walk from Bled to the gorge and back, involving some short roads, is 10km overall. For the best view of the Šum waterfall take a little path from behind the snack shop at the end of the gorge. After going down steps and crossing a bridge the path will take you to the foot of the falls.

• bled.si

Cares gorge, Spain

At 12km long and with a depth of 1,000 metres, this is a classic canyon and has a dramatic, well-maintained walkway, originally built for hydro-electric dam workers, chipped out of its rock walls. Cain, in the Picos de Europa national park, is the village to head for and the start of an unforgettable 15km hike with dizzying views of rivers and mountainside to Poncebos. The gorge starts just to the north of Cain and immediately involves passing through a narrow cleft in a seeming impenetrable wall of rock. Soon, walkers are high above the gushing river – in fact, very high at points. Much of the walk is reasonably level but there are some steeper sections at either end – people walking from Cain-Poncebos-Cain often turn back just before reaching Poncebos because of the hill climb that the return journey would necessitate. Visitors should time their visit carefully: summer weekends in the gorge are very busy and parking spaces in Cain are hard to come by.

Samariá Gorge, Crete

Crete is Europe’s gorge-hiking central. Its south-west coast is riven with deep gashes into the glorious 2,000-plus metre White Mountains. During the second world war such places were hiding spots for allied troops and resistance fighters. The Samariá gorge is the most famous of these but don’t ignore the Imbros (near Chora Sfakia) and Kourtaliotiko. Organised trips to the Samariá gorge leave from every major tourist centre on the island, but its remoteness means there’s a lot of travel involved: a bus journey to the head of the gorge near Omalos, and on completion of the walk, a ferry trip from Agia Roumeli to the nearest ports linked to the road network, where the bus will be waiting. The 16km-walk is intoxicating: visitors descend down steps from near-Alpine altitudes to the bottom of the gorge in pine forest. Halfway along is the ghost village of Samariá, a great place for a rest before the final stretches, when the gorge narrows to pass through the two-metre wide “Iron Gates”.
• The gorge is closed from October to April when rain makes sections too dangerous to traverse

• This article was amended on 17 August, 2015, because Šum Falls, as Abiesalba points out below, is not the largest waterfall in Slovenia. Also, Cain is situated in the Spanish province of León, not Asturias, as also pointed out in the comments.