Explore Greece

Top Cities

Most visited cities in Greece by international tourists.

• 1

  Athens

  Few capital cities carry the weight of Athens — the Acropolis rising above the urban sprawl, the Parthenon still commanding the skyline after 2,500 years, the ancient Agora where Socrates argued and democracy was argued into existence. The National Archaeological Museum holds the Antikythera Mechanism and the gold death mask of Agamemnon under the same roof; below ground, Metro excavations continue to unearth new layers of a city inhabited for at least 7,000 years. The neighbourhood of Monastiraki by day and Psyrri by night show the modern city's particular genius for layering the ancient and the contemporary in the same narrow alley.

• 2

  Santorini

  Santorini is the caldera rim of a Bronze Age supervolcano — the white cubic houses of Oia and Fira stack down the cliff face above a sea that fills what was once the mountain's interior, destroyed in an eruption around 1600 BCE that may have ended Minoan civilisation. The famous blue-domed churches, sunset views over the caldera, and black sand beaches at Perissa draw more than two million visitors a year to an island of 15,000 residents. Inland, the ancient site of Akrotiri preserves a Minoan city frozen mid-life under volcanic ash, with frescoes as vivid as the day they were buried.

• 3

  Mykonos

  Mykonos built its modern reputation on hedonism and whitewash — the windmills above Little Venice, the labyrinthine lanes of Chora designed to confuse pirates, and beach clubs at Paradise that operate on a logic entirely removed from the rest of Greece. Before the jet set arrived it was a fishing town and gateway to Delos, the sacred island where Apollo was born and where an entire ancient city — temples, theatre, mosaics — sits uninhabited and remarkably intact just twenty minutes offshore. Both realities coexist without apparent contradiction.

• 4

  Thessaloniki

  Greece's second city sits at the top of the Thermaic Gulf and wears its Byzantine and Ottoman layers openly — the White Tower on the waterfront, the Rotunda built by Galerius and later converted to church then mosque, the Modiano covered market where the city's reputation for exceptional food is earned every morning. UNESCO-listed Byzantine churches dot the upper city, where the Ano Poli neighbourhood preserves its Ottoman street plan around a Byzantine fortress. Thessaloniki eats earlier, argues louder, and cares more about football than Athens — and considers all of this a point of pride.

• 5

  Crete (Heraklion)

  Crete's capital is less celebrated than Chaniá but more essential — the Heraklion Archaeological Museum holds the finest collection of Minoan art in existence, including the Phaistos Disc, Snake Goddess figurines, and the fresco of the Bull-Leaper, all recovered from the Palace of Knossos five kilometres away. The palace itself is the largest Minoan complex known, a sprawling labyrinth of courtyards and storerooms that gave rise to the myth of the Minotaur. The old Venetian city — harbour, fortress, loggia, and Morosini Fountain — survives in workable condition within the walls.

• 6

  Rhodes Town

  The medieval walled city of Rhodes Town — built by the Knights Hospitaller after 1309 and largely intact today — is one of the best-preserved medieval complexes in Europe, its cobblestone Street of the Knights, hospital, and Grand Masters' Palace still navigable on foot as they were 700 years ago. Beyond the walls, Lindos perches on an acropolis above a turquoise bay with a Doric temple of Athena sharing the summit with a medieval castle, an arrangement that captures the island's layered history in one view. The east coast's long sandy beaches and warm Dodecanese waters run from May well into November.

• 7

  Corfu Town

  Corfu's Old Town is the only place in Greece where you can walk through a Venetian street, past a French arcade, to a British cricket pitch — a UNESCO World Heritage Site reflecting four centuries of foreign occupation without quite resembling any of it. The island's interior bears no resemblance to the package-holiday coast, offering instead the Corfu that Gerald Durrell described in My Family and Other Animals: dark cypress trees, olive groves, and Byzantine monasteries lost in the hills. The northern tip around Kassiopi retains the quality of a place discovered slightly by accident.

• 8

  Chania

  Chaniá's Venetian harbour earns its reputation: the lighthouse, curved quay, domed Ottoman mosque, and narrow lanes of the old town behind it compose a picture that is simply the product of 500 years of competing occupiers each adding their own layer. The covered market, built in 1913 on the model of Marseille's, sells every product Crete produces under a cruciform roof that is the best shopping experience on the island. The Lefkà Óri — the White Mountains — visible above the town are the start of the Samariá Gorge, one of Europe's great walks.

• 9

  Delphi

  Delphi sits on the slopes of Mount Parnassus in a fold of rock the ancient Greeks believed to be the navel of the world — the Sacred Way climbing through ruined treasuries to the Temple of Apollo, with the theatre and stadium above and the Gulf of Corinth below. The Oracle at Delphi was the most powerful religious institution in the ancient Mediterranean world for nearly a thousand years, consulted by kings and city-states before every significant decision. The site museum holds the Charioteer of Delphi, one of the finest surviving bronzes from antiquity.

• 10

  Meteora

  The monasteries of Meteora occupy the summits of free-standing rock pillars rising from the Plain of Thessaly — six still-active foundations out of an original 24, built between the 14th and 16th centuries by monks who chose the most inaccessible ground available and then found ways to build on it. UNESCO-listed and unlike anything else in Europe, the combination of Byzantine frescoes, sheer sandstone faces, and the Thessalian plain stretching to the horizon creates one of those landscapes that exceed all prior expectations. The village of Kalambaka at the base makes an easy overnight base with considerably less asceticism than the monks.

• 11

  Nafplio

  Nafplio was the first capital of independent Greece and retains the neoclassical elegance and Venetian fortifications appropriate to that distinction — the Palamidi fortress above, the Bourtzi island castle in the harbour, and an old town of narrow lanes built for a European audience. The Argolid plain surrounding it contains Mycenae and Tiryns, the Bronze Age citadels whose Lion Gate and cyclopean walls gave the ancient Greeks a mythology of a race of giants. The town is widely regarded as the most attractive in mainland Greece, with a quality of evening light on the harbour that vindicates the reputation.

• 12

  Olympia

  The sanctuary of Olympia in the western Peloponnese was the birthplace of the Olympic Games — first held in 776 BCE and contested every four years for over a thousand years — and the site retains a peculiar sanctity despite its ruined state. The column drums of the Temple of Zeus lie exactly where they fell in an earthquake in the 6th century CE; the museum holds Praxiteles' statue of Hermes and the Winged Victory of Paeonius, among the finest Greek marbles anywhere. The 192-metre starting line of the ancient stadium is still visible, and still occasionally run.

• 13

  Paros

  Paros occupies the centre of the Cyclades in both geography and temperament — a marble island whose stone was used for the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace, with good beaches, a well-preserved Byzantine church at Parikia, and a food culture more relaxed than Mykonos. Náoussa on the north coast, a former fishing village now running good restaurants around its Venetian harbour, is the standard against which other Cycladic villages are measured. The smaller island of Antiparos, a 10-minute ferry ride away, has maintained the atmosphere that Paros had twenty years ago.

• 14

  Naxos

  Naxos is the largest and most fertile of the Cyclades — it grows its own potatoes, citrus, and marble, producing a genuinely distinctive local cuisine that makes it a satisfying counterpoint to islands that live entirely by tourism. The Portara, a massive marble gateway of an unfinished Temple of Apollo from the 6th century BCE, stands on a promontory connected to the port by a causeway and is the most distinguished ruin in the Cyclades not on Delos. The interior villages of the Tragaea, set among olive trees and Byzantine churches, are a different Greece entirely from the waterfront.

• 15

  Mystra

  Mystra is the best-preserved Byzantine city in Greece — a ghost town on the slopes of the Taÿgetos Mountains above Sparta, abandoned in the 1830s after four centuries of occupation by Greeks, Franks, Venetians, and Ottomans in succession. Its churches retain extraordinary fresco cycles from the 13th and 14th centuries, when Mystra was the cultural capital of a declining empire producing philosophers whose ideas influenced the Italian Renaissance. The combination of ruined palaces, intact churches, and the Laconian landscape of olive groves stretching to the sea makes this one of the most rewarding sites in Greece.

• 16

  Zakynthos

  Zakynthos is the Ionian island of the Blue Caves and Shipwreck Beach — the Navagio, a rusting freighter marooned in a limestone cove accessible only by boat, is one of the most reproduced images in Greek tourism, and the reality matches the photograph. The sea turtle Caretta caretta nests on the south coast beaches protected by a national marine park, managed better here than almost anywhere in the Mediterranean. The island's interior is a productive olive and citrus landscape that once supplied Venice and still feels agricultural in ways the coast does not.

• 17

  Kefalonia

  Kefalonia is the largest of the Ionian Islands and the setting of Louis de Bernières' Captain Corelli's Mandolin — a novel that brought the island to global attention while depicting the Italian and German occupation of World War II with an accuracy still contested locally. Myrtos Beach, descending through limestone cliffs to turquoise water, is among the most photographed in Greece; the Melissani Lake, where sunlight floods a subterranean pool through a collapsed ceiling, is a geological attraction without equivalent elsewhere in the Ionians. The island produces its own distinctive Robola wine from high-altitude vineyards above Argostoli.

• 18

  Halkidiki

  Halkidiki extends three peninsulas into the Aegean from the northern Greek mainland — Kassandra and Sithonia draw beach crowds from Thessaloniki with long sandy coasts and pine-backed coves, while the third, Mount Athos, is an autonomous monastic state of twenty Byzantine monasteries inhabited by Orthodox monks almost continuously since the 9th century. Women are excluded from Athos entirely; men may visit on a strictly limited pilgrim's permit. The beaches of Sithonia, particularly around Porto Koufo and Kalamitsi, are widely considered the finest in northern Greece.

• 19

  Epidaurus

  The ancient theatre at Epidaurus is the best-preserved in the Greek world and the best-sounding — seated for 14,000 spectators, its acoustics allow a coin dropped on stage to be heard from the back row, a fact theatre designers have been attempting to explain and replicate for a century. Built in the 4th century BCE as part of the sanctuary of Asclepius, god of medicine, it still hosts the Athens-Epidaurus Festival each summer with productions using the original sight lines without amplification. The sanctuary complex — temples, tholos, stadium, and the original hospital where patients slept hoping for healing dreams — is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

• 20

  Ioannina

  Ioannina is the capital of Epirus and one of the most atmospheric cities in Greece, its old walled quarter projecting into Lake Pamvotis on a promontory dominated by a Byzantine castle that became the residence of Ali Pasha, the Albanian-born Ottoman warlord whose court at the turn of the 19th century was a byword for power and intrigue. The small island in the lake, reached by motorboat in five minutes, contains seven monasteries and the house where Ali Pasha was assassinated in 1822; the surrounding mountains are the gateway to the Vikos Gorge, one of the deepest in the world. Zagori villages to the north, built in grey stone around central squares, are as beautiful as any rural architecture in Greece.