Located near to Karavomilos, Melissani Lake is the most spectacular cave lake on the island. The road signs are ambiguous and the lake is nearer to Karavomilos than you would first think. Within a few hundred yards off the Sami to Agia Efimia main road. The entrance is not clearly marked.
Found on the island at the entrance to the inner cave in 1951 was an ancient lantern. In the 1963 excavations, Marinatos found a clay figurine depicting the god Pan, a disc showing Pan surrounded by dancing nymphs and a fragment showing the figure of a woman in relief who is believed to be the nymph Melissanthe (from which the lake name is derived) who fell in love with Pan. Sadly she drowned in the lake when he rejected her. Exactly what she was doing in a damp dark and flooded cave in the first place, folklore does not tell us, anyway all artifacts can now been seen in the archaeological museum in Argostoli.
Lake Melissani has an absolute invisible specialty, which sounds pretty strange. The lake water is brackish, a mixture of sea water and sweet water. The cave is about 500m from the sea, and the water level is a meter higher than sea level, and the brackish water rises from a 30m deep cave system on one side of the cave and flows silently to the other end of the cave, flowing through narrow crevices into the sea.Here the water from the Katavothres on the other side of the island reappears. This was discovered by dye tracing experiments in 1959.