Destinations

The closest proper island to Athens, with one of the best-preserved Doric temples in Greece, a pistachio crop it is famous for, and a…

A tiny island north of Patmos with about a hundred residents, three settlements, no bank and no road worth the name, reached on the…

A small pine-covered Saronic island an hour from Piraeus, with clear water off rocky coves, one road and enough space to walk or cycle…

The largest town in western Greece, built on tobacco and now largely agricultural, between the Trichonida and Lysimachia lakes with mountains behind.

A quiet Sporades island whose waters are a national marine park, protecting Mediterranean monk seals, with an earthquake-abandoned old village restored on the hill.

Antiparos sits across a narrow channel from Paros, close enough that the ferry takes minutes, and far enough that the two islands do not…

A stone town on the flank of Parnassos, ten minutes from Delphi, that fills with Athenians every winter weekend and empties into a quiet…

A minute island north-east of Patmos with about fifty residents, one hamlet around a fjord-like harbour, and an uninhabited neighbour with the best sand…

A Dodecanese island shaped like a butterfly, two lobes joined by a strip a hundred metres wide, with a white chora under a Venetian…

Athens is Greece’s mainland capital, not an island, and the gateway where almost every Greece trip begins.

Greece’s food capital and second city: where to stay by neighbourhood, the Byzantine old town, and day trips to Meteora and Halkidiki.

The capital of Evia, joined to the mainland by a short bridge over a channel whose current reverses several times a day and has…

Chios is the big North Aegean island whose southern villages grow the only mastic commercially harvested anywhere on earth.

Crete is the largest Greek island, a country-sized land of four regions that runs 250 km end to end, not a three-day stop.

Delphi is the sanctuary of Apollo terraced into the slope of Mount Parnassus, a mainland mountainside, not an island stop.

A mountain village in Arcadia stacked above a gorge, once the gunpowder works of the Greek revolution, now the base for monasteries built into…

The sacred city of the Macedonian kings at the foot of Mount Olympus, waterlogged and green, where parts of the excavation sit under standing…

The most isolated of the Small Cyclades, a small dry island with one harbour village, a handful of beaches and ferry connections thin enough…

A northern town built around a park where springs rise straight out of the ground into pools and channels, with a serious wine region…

A small island off the south-east Peloponnese, reached by a ten-minute ferry, whose double bay at Simos is regularly called the best beach in…

The sanctuary west of Athens where initiates underwent a rite for two thousand years and none of them recorded what happened, now surrounded by…

A fourth-century BC theatre with acoustics good enough that a coin dropped on the orchestra floor is audible from the back row, inside a…

A quiet Argolid town on a narrow pine-covered headland, with a harbour on one side, a bay on the other, and boats to Hydra…

Evia is Greece’s second-largest island, and the rare one you reach by bridge from the mainland rather than by ferry.

A northern border town known nationally for its red peppers and its winters, and the base for the Prespa lakes, where Greece, Albania and…

A small chain of islands between Ikaria and Samos that lives on fishing rather than visitors, with one harbour village, empty coves and the…

A quiet harbour town of nineteenth-century shipowners’ mansions on the Gulf of Corinth, half an hour from Delphi, that stopped growing when sail gave…

A small island south of Crete that is the southernmost land in Europe, with a few dozen residents, no real roads and a long…

A tiered port town on the Laconian gulf where the Mani begins, with a causeway to a small island, a shipwreck on the beach…

A working port on the Epirus coast that exists to move vehicles: ferries to Corfu in about ninety minutes and to Italy overnight, with…

Ikaria is a mountainous North Aegean island famous as a Blue Zone, where people live long and the clock is ignored.

The capital of Epirus, built on a lake with an inhabited island in it, keeping the best-preserved Ottoman citadel in Greece and the base…

A high, forested Ionian island opposite the Acarnanian coast with one harbour village, almost no cars, and a sailing anchorage that is the reason…

A mountain town in the northern Peloponnese reached by a rack railway through a gorge, with a ski centre above it and a wartime…

A steep Dodecanese island that made its living from sponge diving and now draws climbers from across Europe to the limestone above its west…

A planned nineteenth-century town at the southern tip of Evia, under Mount Ochi, with a sea castle, ancient marble quarries and prehistoric dragon houses…

The easternmost Greek island, a single painted harbour two kilometres off Turkey and 120 from Rhodes, with a blue sea cave and a population…

A small west-coast harbour whose main function is landing cruise passengers for Olympia, half an hour inland, with a quiet beach village underneath the…

A plain town between Mount Olympus and a long sandy coast, unremarkable in itself and the practical base for Dion, Litochoro and the Pieria…

A northern port city built up a headland under a Byzantine castle, with a Roman-era aqueduct running through the middle of it and the…

A small chalk island a ten-minute ferry from Milos, with a Venetian kastro village, a rock formation called the mushroom, and almost no development…