Two of these three have a national answer. One of them does not.
Last checked: 13 July 2026
- The sockets. Type C and type F, 230 volts, 50 hertz, the same as most of continental Europe. Arriving from Europe, you need nothing.
- The adapter. Arriving from the UK, the US, Canada, Australia or Japan, you need a plug adapter. You almost certainly do not need a voltage converter, and the proof is printed on your charger.
- The tap water. There is no country-level answer to find. Water in Greece is supplied municipality by municipality, so this page hands you the method for the island you are standing on instead of a guess about the country.
- Wi-Fi. Normal in hotels and cafes, missing where it matters. It is not a connectivity plan, and that has its own page.
The plug is type C or type F, and your charger already knows the rest
Greece uses type C and type F plugs, the two round-pin sockets used across most of continental Europe, on a 230 volt, 50 hertz supply. Travellers from the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and Japan need a plug adapter. Most modern electronics need nothing more than that.
Learn the two names, because you will meet them on the back of a packet. Type C is the plain two-round-pin plug with no earth. Type F, the Schuko, has the same two round pins plus earth clips on its sides and sits in a recessed round socket. The useful part is that a type C plug fits a type F socket, which is why the cheapest adapter in the shop usually works. The standard reference for which plug a country uses is the IEC’s World Plugs, and it puts Greece at type C and type F, 230 V, 50 Hz.
Now turn the question around, because you have been asking the wrong one. It does not matter what voltage Greece runs on. It matters what your device accepts, and that is printed on the charger in small grey type.
Go and find a charger now. If the label reads INPUT 100-240V ~ 50/60Hz, the device is dual voltage. It will run on Greek electricity exactly as it runs at home, and all you need is a shaped piece of plastic to get the pins into the wall. Phone chargers, laptop bricks, camera chargers and electric toothbrushes almost universally read this.
A voltage converter is only ever a question for a single-voltage appliance, and in practice that means a hair dryer, a straightener or an older shaver. The honest advice for nearly everyone is to leave it at home. A converter big enough to actually drive a hair dryer is heavy, expensive and mostly disappointing, and the hotel has one on the bathroom wall.
One detail worth two sentences. Type F is earthed and type C is not, so a cheap two-pin travel adapter carries no earth at all. If you are travelling with a laptop that has a three-pin cable, take a proper earthed adapter, or better, take one good adapter and a European multi-socket extension lead, which turns a single Greek socket into four. That matters more than it sounds: there are fewer sockets in an older Greek building than you want, and one of them is behind the bed.
That is the whole adapter decision. What else goes in the bag is a longer conversation.
The tap water: there is no national answer, and here is who actually has one
Water in Greece is supplied municipality by municipality. Athens is supplied by EYDAP. Thessaloniki is supplied by EYATH. Each island is supplied by its own municipal water company, a DEYA, which runs the local network and tests it. Ask “is the tap water in Greece safe” and you have not asked one question. You have asked several hundred, one for each supply area, and the answer to each is held by the body that put the water in the pipe.
Take Athens, because it shows the shape of a real answer. EYDAP states that it carries out daily laboratory quality checks of raw and drinking water, seven days a week, 365 days a year; that this comes to roughly 170,000 determinations across some 10,000 drinking-water samples and 2,000 raw-water samples a year; that the water meets the legislative requirements; and that the average values of every parameter it measures are published on its own website each year. Athenians drink it from the tap.
Read that paragraph again and notice what it does not do. It does not certify anything. It names the supplier, reports what the supplier publishes, and describes what people there do, and that is the only construction this page uses anywhere.
The islands are where the question gets its teeth. Many Greek islands have little natural fresh water of any consequence, and their supply is desalinated seawater, borehole water, or a mixture of the two that can shift through the season as demand rises. That is the mechanism behind both halves of the confusion: it is why island water can taste of minerals or faintly of the sea, and it is why the answer genuinely changes when you get off a ferry.
Santorini is the island everyone asks about, so here is what its utility actually publishes. DEYA Thiras, the municipal water company for Santorini and Therasia, posts its water quality control results as tables of measured parameters, and those results state that in the districts of Akrotiri, Fira, Oia and Therasia the supplied water comes from desalination units, with other areas drawing on boreholes. Its published methodology sets out a drinking-water monitoring programme under the Greek drinking-water legislation, with sampling at the sources, at the treatment plants and in the distribution network.
And here is the honest part, which no page competing for this question will give you: we read those pages, and we did not find a plain statement, in either direction, on whether the network water is intended to be drunk. What DEYA Thiras publishes is a table of parameters, not a verdict. A table of parameters is a real, checkable document and it is far more than any travel blog is working from, but it is not somebody telling you the answer, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
So we will say plainly what we will not do. We do not certify any water anywhere as safe to drink, and we do not certify any water as unsafe either. That is a public-health judgement, it belongs to a utility and a health authority, and it is not ours to make. Every page that answers this question in one confident national sentence has issued a certificate it has no standing to issue.
What we can tell you is what people do. On many islands the common practice, among visitors and among a great many residents, is to buy bottled water for drinking and use the tap for washing, cooking and cleaning teeth. Bottled water is sold in every mini-market, kiosk and petrol station, in small bottles and in the large carriers people take back to the room. That is a description of behaviour, not a health claim, and it is true.
The fastest authority on the water in front of you is the building you are standing in. Hotels and rented rooms very often post a notice about it in the bathroom or the kitchen, and a host will answer the question in one sentence, because they live there and they drink it. Ask them. That is faster than any website, including this one, and it is specific to the actual tap, which no website can be.
Taste is not a verdict. Water that tastes brackish or mineral-heavy is water that came out of the sea or out of rock, and that is what it tastes of. A traveller who reasons from an odd taste to a health risk has made an inference the taste does not support. We are not reassuring you either. We are saying the taste is not evidence, in either direction, and the judgement belongs to somebody with a laboratory.
One last habit, and it is the most useful one on this page. Before you accept anybody’s answer to this question, look at what the website giving it sells. A prominent English-language answer to “is the tap water in Santorini safe to drink” sits on the content arm of a company whose shop sells water-filter bottles. That is not a conspiracy, it is a business model, and it is worth knowing whose answer you are reading. If you feel genuinely unwell on a trip, a Greek pharmacy is the first door to knock on, not a search engine.
Wi-Fi is everywhere it is easy, and nowhere it matters
Free wifi is genuinely normal in Greek hotels, rented rooms, cafes and tavernas. The password is usually printed on the receipt or given if you ask, and asking is completely ordinary, so ask.
There is also a free public network that almost no travel page mentions, and it has a name you can look for. Under WiFi4EU, the European Commission funded free wifi hotspots in municipal public spaces across Europe, and Greek municipalities took the vouchers up. The Commission puts hotspots in places like town halls, public libraries, museums, parks and squares, and it requires the network’s name, its SSID, to be the same everywhere: WiFi4EU. The scheme’s rules are the interesting part. The Commission states that the network must be free to use, and that neither payment nor indirect payment through advertising or data farming is permitted on it, for a three-year period of engagement.
That three-year clause is also the honest caveat, so take it with the fact. A voucher granted some years ago is not a working hotspot this afternoon, and a municipality’s engagement period can have run its course. Look for the network in a square; do not plan a day around one.
Now the useful half, which is where wifi fails. It fails mid-crossing on a ferry, as the coast recedes and the land network goes with it. It fails on a beach. It fails in a mountain village, and it fails inside the archaeological sites you have travelled a long way to stand in. Those are precisely the moments you wanted to send an address to the person collecting you.
Which is the whole conclusion: if being contactable matters, wifi is not the plan, and mobile data is. Everything about SIM cards, eSIMs, roaming and which Greek network you end up riding on is answered properly in staying connected in Greece, and this page will not repeat a word of it.
The habit that solves most of it costs nothing. Download the map, the ticket and the boarding pass while you are still on the hotel wifi, before you walk out of the door. Do it the night before a ferry and the crossing stops mattering.
The hot water runs out, and the paper goes in the bin
A great many Greek buildings, and a very large share of island ones, heat their water in a solar unit on the roof. That single fact explains a complaint you will otherwise misdiagnose.
What you notice as a guest: the hot water is at its most plentiful in the late afternoon and early evening, after a day of sun on the roof. It can run out after several consecutive showers, because the tank is a tank. And there is usually an electric immersion switch somewhere in the flat as a backup, which your host will show you if you ask. So a cold shower in a Greek apartment at eight in the morning, after the two people before you, is a scheduling problem and not a broken boiler.
Then the bin, which deserves a plain paragraph rather than a joke. Waste pipes in many Greek buildings are narrower than travellers are used to, and the widespread practice in homes, hotels, tavernas and public buildings is that paper goes into the covered bin beside the toilet rather than into the bowl. There is very often a small sign in the bathroom saying exactly that, in English.
The rule that keeps this accurate is the one nobody bothers to give you: the instruction belongs to the building, not to the country. Follow the sign in the bathroom you are actually standing in. Newer hotels frequently have modern plumbing and no sign at all, and “in Greece you can never flush paper” is a blanket claim about several million buildings that nobody is in a position to make. Read the sign, and if there is a bin with a lid and a sign above it, use the bin.
Neither of these is a quirk. One is a solar panel and one is a pipe. Greetings, dress, church behaviour and the rest of it are a different subject and live in Greek etiquette and customs .
The small power things that will catch you
None of these is Greek. All of them will happen to you in Greece.
- The key-card slot by the door. In many hotel rooms the power only works with the card in the slot. The phone you left charging while you went down to breakfast did not charge, and you will discover that at the ferry gate.
- There are fewer sockets than you want. In older buildings the one you need is behind the bed or behind the wardrobe. One good adapter and one European multi-socket extension lead solves the entire trip and weighs almost nothing.
- A two-pin adapter carries no earth. Type C has no earth pin, so a cheap two-pin adapter is not the right home for a three-pin laptop cable. Buy the earthed one.
- Charge at dinner, not at bedtime. You are out all day with a phone running maps, a ferry app and a camera. The socket you will actually be near for two uninterrupted hours is the one under the taverna table, or the one in the room while you are changing.
What to pack, and what to ask when you arrive
Bring one earthed type C or F adapter, and a European multi-socket lead if you are travelling with more than a phone. Before you buy anything else, read the INPUT line on your own charger: if it says 100-240V, you are done, and the converter aisle is not for you. Leave the hair dryer at home.
Then, when you arrive, ask the building about the water, or read the notice in the bathroom. It knows and we do not.
That is the most important sentence on this page, so here it is without the hedging. We describe what Greek water utilities publish and what people there actually do, and we do not certify that any water is safe to drink, because that is not ours to certify. The utility that supplies the tap in front of you is the authority, and we would rather name it than replace it. Last checked 13 July 2026; what we re-check here is the utilities’ published results and the WiFi4EU position, and how we date and check what you read is written down.
Next: staying online properly, and the rest of the Greece travel guide.
Common questions
What plug adapter do you need for Greece?
Greece uses type C and type F sockets, the two round-pin standard used across most of continental Europe, at 230 volts and 50 hertz. Travellers from the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and Japan need a plug adapter. Travellers from most of Europe need nothing at all. Before you buy anything else, read the label on your own charger. The IEC’s World Plugs reference is the standard citation for plug type by country.
Do you need a voltage converter in Greece?
Almost certainly not, and the answer is on the label rather than in an opinion. If your charger reads INPUT 100-240V, 50/60Hz, it is dual voltage and a plug adapter is all it needs. Phones, laptops, cameras and electric toothbrushes read this. The exception is a single-voltage appliance, which in practice means a hair dryer, a straightener or an older shaver: leave it at home and use the hotel’s.
Can you drink the tap water in Greece?
There is no single answer for Greece, and that is the honest one. Water is supplied municipality by municipality, much of the island supply is desalinated, and the authority for any given tap is the utility that supplies it. In Athens, EYDAP tests daily, states that the water meets the legislative requirements, and publishes its results, and Athenians drink it from the tap. On many islands the common practice is bottled water for drinking and the tap for washing and teeth. The fastest authority is your hotel or host: ask them, and read the notice in the bathroom. We do not certify any water as safe or unsafe to drink.
Can you drink the tap water in Santorini?
Santorini’s supply is largely desalinated seawater, with boreholes elsewhere on the island. DEYA Thiras, the municipal water company, runs the desalination units and publishes its water quality control results and its testing methodology. We read those pages and did not find a plain statement, in either direction, on whether the network water is intended to be drunk, so we are not going to invent one: what the utility publishes is a table of parameters, not a verdict. The common practice among visitors is bottled water. Ask your accommodation, which drinks it, and note that a prominent English-language answer to this exact question is published by a company that sells water-filter bottles.
Is there free Wi-Fi in Greece?
Yes. Free wifi is normal in hotels, rented rooms, cafes and tavernas, and the password is usually on the receipt or given on request. There are also EU-funded free public hotspots in many Greek municipal spaces under the WiFi4EU programme, on a network named WiFi4EU, and the Commission’s rules require it to be free of charge and free of advertising and data farming for a three-year engagement period. The limit is honest: wifi fails on ferries, on beaches and in the mountains, so it is not a connectivity plan.
Why is there a bin next to the toilet in Greece?
Waste pipes in many Greek buildings are narrower than travellers are used to, and the widespread practice in homes, hotels and tavernas is that paper goes into the covered bin beside the toilet rather than into the bowl. There is usually a sign saying so. The rule to follow is the building’s, not the country’s: newer plumbing exists, and if there is no bin and no sign, there is nothing to do.
Why does the hot water run out in Greek hotels and apartments?
Because a great many Greek buildings heat their water in a solar unit on the roof. Hot water is therefore most plentiful in the late afternoon and early evening, and it can run out after several consecutive showers. There is usually an electric backup switch somewhere in the flat, and your host will show you where. Ask before assuming the boiler is broken.