Zagori, in the mountains of Epirus in northwestern Greece, is a cultural landscape of stone villages, paths, bridges and cultivated ground set around dramatic terrain that includes the Vikos Gorge. Its settlements developed through adaptation to steep slopes, seasonal conditions and limited agricultural space. The region's history cannot be separated from this geography, but it was never simply an isolated refuge. Routes across the mountains linked local communities with markets and migration networks, bringing ideas and resources into villages whose outward appearance now seems closely unified.

During Ottoman rule, Zagori's communities developed forms of local organisation within the wider imperial system. Their fortunes varied, and prosperity depended on more than production within the mountains. Merchants and migrants working elsewhere could send resources home or finance public works. Such connections help explain the substantial houses, churches, schools and other buildings found in relatively small settlements. The architecture records both local craftsmanship and participation in a much wider world, challenging an impression of villages whose economic and cultural lives remained entirely enclosed within their valleys.

Stone was central to construction because it was readily available and suited to durable walls, roofs and paved routes. Skilled builders created arched bridges over streams and rivers, allowing people, animals and goods to move between settlements. Paths and stairways were essential infrastructure rather than picturesque additions. Their maintenance required cooperation and investment, and some bridges carried the names or memories of benefactors. Taken together, these structures reveal a network whose working relationships mattered as much as the architectural character of any individual village.

The Vikos Gorge gives the area a powerful natural focus, but the surrounding landscape also contains evidence of pastoral work, woodland use and cultivation. Changing political borders, migration and twentieth century conflict affected the settlements, while population movement altered patterns of use and maintenance. Buildings could survive after the economic arrangements that produced them had weakened. Later conservation and tourism brought further changes, making it important to distinguish a continuously inhabited community from an idealised image of rural life fixed at a single moment in the past.

Zagori was inscribed on the World Heritage List as a cultural landscape in 2023. The recognition concerns the relationship between settlements, routes and environment, rather than treating the gorge alone as the whole historical subject. Understanding that relationship gives the stone villages greater depth: their houses express family resources, bridges reveal shared needs and paths record connections across difficult ground. Zagori's significance lies in the cumulative choices through which communities made a mountainous region habitable while sustaining relationships that reached far beyond the landscape visible from any village square.