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The narrow Pelion peninsula rises in only half a dozen miles to 5,000ft, high enough for skiing in winter with a clear view of the sea. The villages on the western side are recognisably Greek, with tavernas along the sea edge between tall, white-painted eucalyptus trees. To the south, it begins to look like Tuscany, with lines of Mediterranean cypresses and poplars and hillsides of camomile. But the north-east corner is unique.

The village houses have sloping stone roofs, like Cotswold cottages. They are also slightly Tyrolean, slightly Yemeni, a little like Charles Rennie Mackintosh, but unlike anything you would expect to find in Greece. Or anywhere.

The mountains are covered in a dense forest of plane, sweet chestnut, walnut, oak and holly with more than 2,000 species of indigenous plants, including ferns, moss and clematis. You cannot walk far without hearing the sound of running water. The air is fresh even in August.

By the coast, bougainvillaea grows from English lawns of grass, daisies and buttercups. Rhododendrons and camellias look happier than anywhere in mainland Europe. Roses thrive untroubled by blackfly or mildew. At Damouchari in mid-May, a magnolia grandiflora was in flower, three months out of season.

But the best plant of all was the plane tree in the main square in Tsangarada, one of the most extraordinary plants anywhere in the world. It is said to be 1,500 years old and has a trunk more than 25ft in diameter, far wider than the largest English oak. One of its branches is propped up on a stone plinth, as though it is leaning against a bar. Contrary to the usual laws of botany, two other branches join together 20ft above the trunk to form a single, seamless arm.

It doesn't seem like a plant at all, more like a giant cuttlefish, staring at you and thinking its impenetrable cuttlefish-like thoughts.

The original inhabitants of the area claimed descent from Ixion, an oak god with mistletoe genitals (although how anyone could sire children with mistletoe genitals is not clear). They worshipped the centaur in fly agaric-fuelled rituals, and their promiscuity shocked the more straitlaced Hellenes.

The cave of the centaurs can still be found in the mountains above Milies, but few echoes remain of the early inhabitants and their bizarre cults. They were driven out in the dawn of the Classical Age, and the modern settlements were founded by Slavs from the north in the 6th century AD.

Late one night, I met a large, very healthy-looking fox. But there are no longer any bears, wild boar or wolves in the forest. And definitely no centaurs.

Unlike anywhere else in the western Mediterranean, Pelion has enjoyed 1,500 years of virtually unbroken prosperity and stability. Even the 1955 earthquake, which flattened Volos and much else besides, passed Pelion by. It is still a very affluent place. The roads are free of pot-holes. The water is safe to drink. The lavatories work.

This is not a peasant culture. The old lady in the hills selling herbs and preserved fruit is probably the wife of the retired director-general of Greece Telecom.

The Ottoman Empire, which did so much damage to the rest of Greece, left Pelion largely alone. It became an intellectual and artistic centre, and many villages have art galleries and bohemian communities.

The owner of the hotel in Damouchari looks like someone from the Paris left bank in the 50s or 60s. At night, round the smouldering wood fire in the bar, he and his friends play a fusion of modern jazz and traditional Greek folk music. The garden and the bar are full of odd objects. The pebbles on the small beach are like giant mint imperials.

Half an hour's walk to the south, Milopotamos is as pretty a beach as you are likely to find anywhere. On an early-summer morning, it was completely deserted.

This is serious walking country, criss-crossed with 800km of stone-paved tracks, most of them more than 500 years old. You can hire a professional guide for the day or you can take it easy and go by taxi to the next higher village, making your own way back.

A little train, which once took olive oil and fruit to Volos, now carries tourists from Ano Lehonia to Milies (£4 return). (The clock tower at Ano Lehonia showed four different times, all of them wrong.) Sadly, the engine has been converted to diesel, but the passengers no longer have to get out and push, as often used to be the case. It chugs along at 10 miles an hour, over narrow-arched viaducts and a seriously impressive iron bridge. When it goes through a tunnel, it feels like a fairground ghost train. The track from Ano Lehonia to Volos has been made into a road, the rails occasionally showing through the tarmac like half-buried memories.

The railway was designed by the father of Giorgio de Chirico, the great metaphysical painter and father of surrealism. As a child, he lived in a house overlooking the railway, and the train and the viaducts were recurring symbols in much of his work. Between 1912 and 1919, he painted a series of empty, dreamlike townscapes with arched buildings, long shadows, odd perspectives, steam trains frozen in time, clocks at unlikely times, statues and everyday objects taken out of their usual context. The art books tell you that his pictures were a product of his bizarre imagination, but most of the ingredients can be found in Pelion.

There are no paintings by de Chirico in Milies, but up from the station in the church by the square, there is a Hieronymus Bosch-like fresco of the Last Judgment, which is every bit as weird.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Guardian.

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