Explore Greece

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Acropolis, crowned by the Parthenon (447-432 BCE) and its sister temples the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike, is the most architecturally significant hill in Western civilization — the limestone plateau on which the Athenians in the Age of Pericles created the defining monuments of classical Greek architecture, their proportional refinements studied, copied, and debated for 2,500 years. The New Acropolis Museum opened in 2009 to house the sculptures, including the Caryatid porch figures and the Parthenon frieze blocks remaining in Athens, in sight of the hill from which they came.

Delphi on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, the seat of the Oracle of Apollo and the most important religious sanctuary of the ancient Greek world, was regarded as the centre of the earth — the navel-stone (omphalos) marked the spot. The Sanctuary of Apollo, with its Sacred Way, the Temple of Apollo (where the Pythia delivered her ambiguous pronouncements), the Theatre, and the Stadium, draws visitors today as it drew pilgrims from across the Mediterranean for a thousand years. The Delphi Museum contains the Charioteer (478 BCE), one of the finest surviving bronze statues of classical antiquity.

The medieval city of Rhodes, built by the Knights Hospitaller after their capture of the island in 1309 and preserved almost intact within its 4-kilometre walls, is the most completely surviving example of a medieval fortified city in the Mediterranean — the Street of the Knights leading to the Grand Master's Palace, the inns of the various Langues (French, English, German, Spanish, Italian), and the Byzantine and Ottoman mosques overlaid on the medieval structure give Rhodes the quality of an inhabited museum. The Knights held Rhodes against Ottoman siege until surrendering in 1522.

The Meteora monasteries in Thessaly — six Eastern Orthodox monasteries built between the 14th and 16th centuries on the summits of spectacular grey sandstone pillars rising abruptly from the Thessalian plain, originally accessible only by rope ladder and net — are the most dramatically sited religious buildings in Europe. Fourteen monasteries were built on the 400-metre pillars; six survive, all still occupied by monks or nuns. The word Meteora means 'suspended in the air'; the view from the monastery of Great Meteoron across the plain to the mountains of Epirus is one of Greece's defining panoramas.

The Temple of Apollo at Bassae in the remote mountains of Arcadia, built between 420 and 400 BCE by the architect Iktinos (one of the architects of the Parthenon), is the best-preserved Greek temple outside Athens — its unusual north-south orientation, interior Corinthian capital (the first known use of the Corinthian order), and the frieze panels (now in the British Museum) representing the Amazonomachy and Centauromachy make it a building of exceptional architectural importance. The temple stands at 1,131 metres in a landscape of complete isolation, protected from the elements by a tent erected in 1987.

Olympia in the western Peloponnese, the sacred precinct where the Olympic Games were held every four years from 776 BCE to 393 CE in honour of Zeus, contains the remains of the Temple of Zeus (whose chryselephantine cult statue, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was destroyed in antiquity), the Temple of Hera, the Stadium, and the Palaestra — a sanctuary that for 1,200 years was the most important gathering place of the Greek world. The Olympia Museum holds the pediment sculptures of the Temple of Zeus and the Hermes of Praxiteles.

Aigai, the ancient first capital of the Kingdom of Macedon, was rediscovered at the modern village of Vergina in northern Greece in 1977 when archaeologist Manolis Andronikos excavated the royal tombs and found intact burials that he attributed to Philip II (father of Alexander the Great) and Alexander IV (Alexander's son). The gold larnax, the gold oak-wreath diadem, and the bronze krater in the main tomb constitute the finest assemblage of Macedonian royal grave goods in existence; the museum built over the undisturbed tumulus is the most atmospheric royal tomb museum in Greece.

The ancient city of Pythagoreion on Samos, birthplace of Pythagoras and site of the Eupalinos tunnel — an 1,036-metre water-supply tunnel bored simultaneously from both ends through limestone circa 540 BCE, meeting in the middle with an error of less than 1 metre, the first tunnel in history built from both ends simultaneously — and the Heraion, the great sanctuary of Hera 6 kilometres to the west, represent the engineering and religious achievements of Archaic Samos at its most ambitious. The Heraion contained the largest Greek temple ever attempted (105 × 55 metres); the single surviving column gives scale to what was destroyed.

The sacred island of Delos in the Cyclades, birthplace of Apollo and Artemis and the religious centre of the Delian League, was the most important sanctuary of the Aegean world during the Classical and Hellenistic periods and the greatest commercial entrepôt of the eastern Mediterranean in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE. Uninhabited since antiquity, the entire island constitutes an archaeological site: the Terrace of the Lions, the House of the Masks, the Theatre Quarter, and the remains of five temples give the clearest picture anywhere of a prosperous Hellenistic commercial city and sacred precinct.

Three Byzantine monasteries built in the 11th and 12th centuries at the height of the middle Byzantine period contain the most important and best-preserved mosaic ensembles in Greece — the golden-ground mosaics of Daphni near Athens, Hosios Loukas in Boeotia, and Nea Moni on Chios represent the three major regional schools of Byzantine monastic decoration and together constitute the finest surviving body of 11th-century Byzantine art in existence. Each monastery's Katholikon (main church) uses its mosaic programme to create a theological and iconographic argument in gold and coloured glass.

Thessaloniki, the second city of Byzantium and the gateway city of the Balkans for fifteen centuries, contains the largest concentration of early Christian and Byzantine churches in Greece — the Rotunda of Galerius (300 CE, one of the best-preserved early Christian buildings in the world), the White Tower, the Arch of Galerius, and fifteen Byzantine churches including the Hagios Demetrios (patron saint of the city), whose 5th-century mosaics are among the most important in early Christianity. The city was the birthplace of Saint Cyril, who with his brother Methodius created the Cyrillic alphabet and brought Christianity to the Slavic peoples.

The monastic community of Mount Athos on the finger of the Chalkidiki peninsula has operated as a self-governing theocratic republic under the sovereignty of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople since the first monasteries were founded in the 9th century CE — today twenty Eastern Orthodox monasteries, housing 2,000 monks from across the Orthodox world, maintain a way of life that preserves Byzantine liturgical tradition intact. Access is restricted to adult men with special permits; women have been excluded since the rule was established in the 10th century. The Great Lavra monastery, founded in 963 CE and continuously inhabited since, is the oldest surviving monastic institution in the world.

Mystras in the Peloponnese, the Byzantine Despotate of Morea's capital in the 14th and 15th centuries and the last major cultural centre of Byzantine civilization before the Ottoman conquest of 1460, contains the most complete ensemble of late Byzantine urban architecture and fresco painting in Greece — the Peribleptos and Pantanassa churches, with their 14th-century frescoes in the Palaeologan Renaissance style, document a late Byzantine artistic revival that influenced Italian Renaissance painting. The philosopher Gemistos Plethon taught here; his presence at the Council of Florence in 1439 helped spark the Florentine Renaissance.

Already covered above under 'Epidaurus'.

The old town of Corfu (Kerkyra), shaped by successive occupations by the Byzantines, the Angevins, the Venetians (1386-1797), the French, and the British, preserves one of the most complex layered urban histories in the Mediterranean — the Venetian-era Old Fortress on its promontory, the New Fortress on the hilltop, the Spianada (the largest square in the Balkans), and the extraordinary density of Venetian church façades, Greek Orthodox bell towers, and neoclassical British colonial buildings create an urban character unique in Greece. Corfu was the first Greek territory to experience the Enlightenment under French rule.

Philippi in eastern Macedonia, founded by Philip II in 356 BCE for its gold mines and subsequently the site of the Battle of Philippi (42 BCE) in which the forces of Octavian and Mark Antony defeated Brutus and Cassius after Julius Caesar's assassination, was the first European city to receive an apostle when Paul arrived in 49 CE — the Letter to the Philippians is the oldest surviving correspondence addressed to a European city. The inscribed site contains the Roman forum, theatre, Hellenistic walls, Early Christian basilicas, and the crypt traditionally identified as Paul's prison.

The Bronze Age citadels of Mycenae and Tiryns dominated the Peloponnese from around 1600 BCE and gave their name to the first great civilisation of mainland Greece. The Lion Gate at Mycenae, with its massive lintel carved with two heraldic lions, is the oldest monumental sculpture in Europe, while the walls of Tiryns — built with stones so massive that ancient Greeks attributed them to the Cyclopes — demonstrate engineering ambition without parallel in the Bronze Age Mediterranean. Inscribed in 1999, these sites are essential to understanding the origins of Greek civilisation.

The island of Patmos is where, according to Christian tradition, Saint John the Theologian received the visions recorded in the Book of Revelation — making it one of the most significant sites in Christendom. The fortified monastery founded in 1088 by Saint Christodoulos dominates the hilltop village of Chora and houses a library of exceptional Byzantine manuscripts, icons, and embroideries documenting Orthodox Christian culture across a millennium. The island's whitewashed village, cave sanctuary, and monastery together preserve a sacred landscape of extraordinary authenticity.

The Zagori region in northwestern Greece encompasses 46 traditional stone villages connected by cobblestone paths and arched packhorse bridges spanning the Vikos Gorge — the deepest gorge in the world relative to its width. The architectural tradition of these villages, built in local grey limestone by master craftsmen whose techniques spread across the Ottoman Empire, created a coherent rural landscape of extraordinary quality where the natural environment and human settlement have achieved near-perfect harmony. Inscribed in 2023, Zagori embodies the highest aspirations of vernacular architecture in the Greek mountain tradition.

The palace complexes of Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Zakros, and Galatas represent the administrative and cultural centres of the Minoan civilisation — Europe's first advanced urban culture, which flourished on Crete from around 2000 BCE and pioneered writing, fresco painting, sophisticated drainage systems, and long-distance maritime trade. Knossos, with its legendary labyrinth and multi-storey palace architecture, is the most visited archaeological site in Greece after the Acropolis. Inscribed in 2023, these palaces represent the foundation chapter of European civilisation.