Rejuvenate. Relax. Rediscover Wellbeing.
Botanica Hills and east Crete form quite naturally a place where a sense of Wellbeing soon affects you.
The aroma of herb covered hillsides, the tastiest natural way of eating well anywhere, year round sunshine, incredible purity of air and sea all combine to help you feel positively rejuvenated.
We have simply enhanced these natural qualities with homes surrounded by calm, environmental harmony and planned for a range of traditional and modern wellbeing enhancing possibilities.
Wellbeing – a combined feeling of physical and mental harmony in tune with nature – is a deeply etched philosophy here; resulting from a 3,000 years span of this same thinking, beginning with the ancient Minoans to the ‘traditional’ Cretans today, who have proved their natural way prolongs life itself. (SEE BELOW).
Nowhere is more naturally good for you. Today, more than ever, we need to rediscover Wellbeing.
The Natural Way to Health and Long Life
Of all Mediterranean locations, the east of Crete and its unique climate really is ‘the land of good living’.
Here grows naturally all year the basics of great flavours and the best classic Mediterranean healthy diet, including incredibly fresh and varied fish, premium quality olive oil and where ‘organic’ is the normal!
Cretans were a key group, chosen because of their traditional way of life and nutrition, in the famous Seven Countries Study (USA, Netherlands, Japan, Finland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece) of 13,000 people in their 40’s over a 15 year period that proved:
Cretan lifestyle gives the lowest incidence of coronary disease
Cretan lifestyle gives the lowest incidence of cancer:
Cretans live the longest overall
This chart shows the number of people who died in each country
over
the 15 year period of the original 13,000 people tracked
The Good Food Pyramid
Cretan eating habits, particularly the high consumption of cereals (including wonderful local breads), premium extra virgin olive oil, daily fresh fruits and vegetables, combined with relatively low intake of meat, are key to the general good health record.
In Crete, even foods which sometimes are seen as unhealthy, like cheese, you will find different varieties that are naturally low in the bad fats and salt. And very tasty!
Furthermore, meat like lamb contains much less fat than normal because the animals roam wild in mountainous terrain – keeping them lean - and feed on wild herbs and plants, making the flavour incredible.
An inverted pyramid is ideal to represent Cretan food intake; the broad top shows the most frequent and highest intake items, the bottom the least intake and frequency.
The Special Greens of Crete
The ‘Greens’ in the pyramid refer to the Cretans very high intake of largely wild organic types of parsley, spinach, lovage and other plants with ‘super-nutrients’. Typically in traditional taverna’s you will find these under the name ‘horta’. Delicious when fresh lemon is squeezed over it.
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