Valtos, over the headland behind the castle. Long and sandy, and the biggest beach here.
Diagram by Greece Trips. Free to reuse with credit - CC BY 4.0.
It is reached on foot in fifteen minutes or by water taxi, which is the useful detail: the walk goes over the headland past the castle, so the journey there is itself worth doing once, and the boat is there for every time after that.
Why that sentence is the whole page
Most beach pages tell you a beach is nice. This one tells you how to get to it twice.
The first trip is the walk, because the castle walk is short, free and the best thing in the town and the path to Valtos takes you over it. The second trip, and the fifth, is the water taxi, because by then you have seen the fortress and you want to be in the sea.
Where it sits on the coast
Parga is a small bay on the Epirus coast, and the swimming is spread over a short stretch either side of it, with a water taxi doing a lot of the work.
Kryoneri, right in front of the town. The most convenient beach here by a distance: it is where the town meets the water, with the little island of Panagia a swim offshore. Swimming out to an island from a town beach is the thing people remember about Parga, and it costs nothing.
Lichnos and Sarakiniko, east and west. Both sandy, and both easier by boat than by road. That last point is the planning fact: the coastline here is indented, so a beach that looks close on a map is not necessarily close by car.
Valtos is the one in the middle of that logic - close enough to walk, big enough to spend a day on.
The castle you walk past
A Venetian fortress on the headland above the town, free to walk into, with a second Ottoman-era fort built by Ali Pasha, whose seat was the citadel at Ioannina, on the hill opposite.
The lanes below it are pedestrian and pleasant, and thoroughly geared to visitors.
Parga looks like an island town because it was governed with the Ionian islands rather than the mainland, under Venetian and then briefly British rule, and it was built in that idiom.
What we do not print
No water-taxi fare, no departure times, no operator, and no sunbed or taverna list for Valtos.
The fifteen minutes is our own guide’s figure for the walk and we carry it as given. We add no gradient and no accessibility claim: it goes over the headland, which is a thing to look at rather than a rating to trust.
Nothing here is certified safe or suitable (CONTENT-18 applies to a headland path as much as to the water).
What you go out to see from here
Parga is a base as much as a destination. Paxos and Antipaxos, a day by boat, for the blue caves and the water. The Acheron river, half an hour inland, which the ancients believed ran into the underworld - the springs at Glyki are icy and clear, and people wade upstream through the gorge.
Common questions
How do you get to Valtos? On foot in fifteen minutes over the headland behind the castle, or by water taxi.
Is it sandy? Long and sandy, and the biggest beach at Parga.
Which beach is most convenient? Kryoneri, in front of the town - not Valtos.
Next
Our Parga guide has the practicalities, the beaches cover the whole stretch, and things to do in Parga covers the castle and the trips inland.