Destinations

A hillside town in the far north of Epirus below Mount Smolikas, with the largest single-arch stone bridge in the Balkans and a gorge…

A flat sandy island small enough to walk end to end, with turquoise coves along its south shore and an uninhabited twin across a…

A large, empty island off the southern Peloponnese that belongs administratively to the Ionians but sits in the Aegean, with waterfalls, a Venetian castle…

A reservoir in the Thessalian mountains ringed by fir forest and stone villages, with a road all the way around it, which Greeks use…

A central Greek town with a castle above it, halfway between Athens and Thessaloniki, and the nearest base to the pass where the three…

A town under an enormous red rock face on the Arcadian coast, now a world climbing destination, whose older residents still speak a dialect…

The base for climbing Mount Olympus, a stone town where the Enipeas gorge comes out of the mountain, with the trailheads and the refuge…

A spa town an hour from Athens built on thermal springs, with a long pebble seafront, one of Europe’s larger casinos, and a lakeside…

A town inside a vast shallow lagoon of salt pans and stilt fishing huts, where Byron died during the siege that made it a…

Meteora is a cluster of monasteries built on top of sandstone rock pillars in mainland Thessaly, not on any island.

The grander of the two Venetian fortresses of Messenia, a huge walled enceinte reaching into the sea with an octagonal Ottoman tower on an…

A medieval town built on the seaward face of a huge rock off the Peloponnese coast, invisible from land, reached by a single causeway…

A self-governing Orthodox monastic state on a Halkidiki peninsula. Twenty monasteries, a permit system, and men only on land. Everyone else sees it from…

A tiny circular Venetian harbour closed by two stone towers, with a castle running up the hill above it, on the north shore of…

Nafplio is Greece’s first capital, a Venetian old town on the Peloponnese mainland under three castles, two hours from Athens.

The most important red wine region in Greece, an hour from Athens, growing the Agiorgitiko grape among the ruins of a sanctuary and a…

A small Dodecanese island that is an active volcano, with a caldera floor you can walk across, steaming vents underfoot and a whitewashed village…

A small island off north-east Chios that produced an outsized share of Greek shipping dynasties, with a maritime school, a marble mermaid in the…

A tenth-century monastery on a slope above the Boeotian plain, holding gold-ground mosaics of the highest order and a crypt of frescoes, half an…

The largest of the Diapontia islands north-west of Corfu and the westernmost land in Greece, with a cave linked to the Odyssey and a…

A tiered amphitheatre of pastel houses under a Venetian castle on the Epirus coast, looking and feeling like an Ionian island town without being…

Greece’s third city and the ferry gate to Italy, with an arcaded main street, a Venetian castle above it, and the largest carnival in…

A pine-covered Saronic island separated from the Peloponnese by a channel a few hundred metres across, with a clocktower town and a ruined temple…

A harbour town at the mouth of the Ambracian gulf with the airport most Ionian trips fly into, a lively old town, and the…

A small arcaded town on a vast natural harbour where a naval battle decided Greek independence, with the best-preserved Mycenaean palace in Greece above…

The island in the strait where the Greek fleet beat Xerxes in 480 BC, now a lived-in suburb of Athens reached by a ten-minute…

Samos is a green, mountainous island in the eastern Aegean, set across a narrow strait from the Turkish coast.

A steep volcanic island in the far north Aegean with rock pools under waterfalls, the highest peak in the Aegean, and the sanctuary where…

A tiny Small Cyclades island with one ridge village, a scatter of unorganised beaches on every side, and a scale that makes walking the…

A bare, rocky western Cycladic island with one of the most dramatic hilltop choras in Greece and the ruins of an iron-mining industry along…

A working northern town on the tobacco plain, with a Byzantine acropolis above it, an Ottoman market hall in the centre, and one of…

The island the rest of Greece rates for its food, with a pottery tradition, a network of stone footpaths and hill villages that have…

A small Cycladic island between Ios and Folegandros with one road, two joined villages on a ridge, terraced vineyards and a church built inside…

The middle of Halkidiki’s three peninsulas, pine-covered and indented with coves, the quiet alternative to the developed leg and the one you drive a…

A small mainland harbour among wooded islets on the Epirus coast, with turquoise bays reachable only by boat and Corfu and Paxos on the…

A Sporades island split in half by geology: pine and farmland in the north, bare mountain in the south, with a hilltop chora that…