Things to do in Patras

Patras is the third city of Greece and the country’s door to the west: the ferries to Italy leave from here, and for a great many travellers Patras is the place they drive onto or off a boat rather than a destination. It repays a night more than that suggests, and this page is the case for giving it one.

The arcades, which are the city’s real signature. The centre is laid out on a grid rising from the port, and its distinguishing feature is long covered colonnades along the main streets. They make the city walkable in both sun and rain, which is a rarer quality in a Greek city than it sounds and shapes how the place is used.

The castle, and the stair up to it. Byzantine on Roman foundations, with a park inside the walls and the whole gulf below. The climb from the centre is by a long stair, Agiou Nikolaou, which is a small event in itself. A castle you reach by climbing a named staircase through a working city is a better hour than most fortresses on a hill reached by car.

Agios Andreas, at the western end of the front. One of the largest churches in the Balkans, built in the twentieth century over the site where Saint Andrew was martyred, and holding relics associated with him. It is modern rather than ancient, and its scale is the point.

The carnival, if your dates allow it. Patras Carnival is the largest in Greece and among the larger ones in Europe: weeks of events through January and February, a treasure hunt that involves much of the city, a night parade, and a closing procession with satirical floats before Lent. It is genuinely a city-wide event rather than a show put on for visitors, and it is the one time of year rooms are hard to find. Plan accordingly in either direction.

The Rio-Antirrio bridge, just north. One of the longest cable-stayed bridges in the world, carrying the road to Epirus across the mouth of the gulf. Crossing it is a piece of engineering tourism in its own right, and if you are driving north you will cross it anyway.

What is within reach. Kalavryta and its rack railway up the Vouraikos gorge, the wineries of Nemea to the east, and Olympia to the south. Any of those turns a stopover into a day.

Getting here, and the rail caveat. Ferries run to Ancona, Bari, Venice and Brindisi. The Athens motorway takes about two and a half hours. There is a suburban rail line but no through train from Athens, which is the detail most planning goes wrong on. Our Patras guide has the practicalities and where to stay covers the grid and the front.