Travel and Tourism in Greece

The Greek Islands: Island-Hopping in the World's Best Archipelago

The experience of island-hopping in Greece is uniquely its own, a form of travel available nowhere else on earth in quite the same way. The combination of six thousand islands, a sophisticated ferry network, warm clear seas, and islands of wildly varying character creates an opportunity for extended exploration that can absorb weeks or months without repetition.

The Cyclades, the most famous island group, offer the quintessential Greek island experience: white cubic architecture, blue domes, windmills, and dramatic clifftop villages above crystal-clear water. Beyond Santorini and Mykonos, the Cyclades include islands of great individual character that receive fewer visitors and offer more authentic encounters with island life. Naxos, the largest Cycladic island, is also the most self-sufficient, with its own agriculture, cheese production, and potatoes famous throughout Greece, as well as the unfinished giant kouros statues at Apollonas and Flerio that give a rare window into the ancient marble quarrying and sculpting tradition. Paros, with its beautiful old town of Parikia and the exquisite village of Naousa on its northern coast, is one of the most livable of the Cyclades. Folegandros, tiny and without an airport, preserves a traditional island atmosphere increasingly rare in the more famous destinations. Milos, a volcanic island like Santorini but far less visited, has the most extraordinary beaches in the Cyclades, including the multicolored cliffs of Sarakiniko and the sea caves of Kleftiko.

The Dodecanese extend along the Turkish coast in a chain of islands each with its own distinct character. Patmos, where the apostle John is said to have received the revelation that became the last book of the New Testament, is one of the most sacred islands in the Orthodox world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Monastery of St. John on the hilltop above Chora is still an active monastic community. Symi, a small island of extraordinary beauty, has a harbor ringed by neoclassical houses in shades of ochre and terracotta that rivals any harbor scene in Greece.

The Ionian Islands, sheltered from the Aegean's Meltemi wind by the Greek mainland, are greener, lusher, and more emphatically Italian in architectural character than their Aegean counterparts, reflecting centuries of Venetian rule. Corfu has a UNESCO-listed old town of remarkable Venetian beauty. Kefalonia, the largest Ionian island, has dramatic mountain scenery, outstanding beaches including the famous Myrtos Beach with its white pebbles and startlingly blue water, and the Melissani underground lake, an extraordinary geological formation where sunlight filters through a hole in the cave roof to illuminate turquoise water. Zakynthos, known abroad for the Shipwreck Beach (Navagio) image of a rusted freighter surrounded by white pebbles in an impossibly blue cove, is also an important nesting site for the loggerhead sea turtle. Ithaka, the legendary home of Odysseus, is one of the smallest Ionian islands and one of the most evocative for travelers with a connection to Greek literature.

UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Greece has accumulated twenty designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites, a figure that reflects the extraordinary density of significant cultural and archaeological heritage concentrated in a relatively small country. The Acropolis of Athens (inscribed 1987) is generally considered the most important ancient monument in Europe. The archaeological site of Delphi (1987), set dramatically on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, was the spiritual center of the ancient Greek world. The archaeological site of Olympia (1989) is the birthplace of the Olympic Games. The medieval city of Rhodes (1988) is the best-preserved medieval fortified city in the Mediterranean. Meteora (1988) encompasses both the extraordinary natural landscape and the Byzantine monasteries perched on its sandstone pillars. The Paleochristian and Byzantine Monuments of Thessaloniki (1988) represent the finest concentration of Byzantine religious art and architecture outside Istanbul. Delos (1990) is the most sacred island in ancient Greece. Mystras (1989) is the finest surviving Byzantine city. The monasteries of Daphni, Hosios Loukas, and Nea Moni of Chios (1990) represent Byzantine art at its peak. The archaeological sites of Mycenae and Tiryns (1999) are the most important Bronze Age sites in mainland Greece. The old town of Corfu (2007) is the most complete example of Venetian urban architecture in Greece. The archaeological site of Philippi (2016) reflects the site of one of the decisive battles of the Roman world and an important early Christian center. The archaeological site of Vergina (1996) contains the extraordinary tombs of the Macedonian kings. The Zagori Cultural Landscape (2023) encompasses the forty-six traditional stone-built villages of the mountainous Zagori region in northwestern Greece, including Papigo, Monodendri, and Mikro Papigo, interconnected by arched stone bridges called gephyria and cobblestone paths called kalderimia, representing an extraordinary example of vernacular mountain architecture and a traditional way of life that has endured for centuries in the Pindus Mountains of Epirus. The Minoan Palatial Centres (2025) is a serial inscription comprising the four major Minoan palace complexes on Crete: Knossos, the largest Bronze Age palace in the Aegean dating from approximately 1900 to 1350 BCE; Phaistos, the second largest Minoan palace with extraordinary views toward Mount Ida; Malia, a well-preserved palatial complex with its distinctive kernos offering stone; and Zakros, the easternmost Minoan palace, extraordinarily preserved due to its abandonment after the catastrophic eruption of Thera around 1628 BCE. Together these palatial centres represent the pinnacle of Minoan civilization — Europe's first advanced society — and constitute the most significant ensemble of Bronze Age palatial architecture in the world. The 2025 inscription brought official UNESCO recognition to the cradle of European civilization.

Corfu and the Ionian Islands

Corfu, the northernmost of the Ionian Islands and the gateway through which many visitors enter Greece from western Europe, has a character distinctly different from any other Greek island. Greener, more lush, and more emphatically Venetian in its architectural and cultural sensibility, Corfu was a Venetian possession from 1386 to 1797, then briefly French under Napoleon, then British as a protectorate from 1815 to 1864, before finally uniting with Greece. This sequence of Western European rulership gave the island a Catholic minority alongside its Orthodox majority, an architectural heritage of Venetian campanili and loggias, a tradition of classical music rooted in the Italian operatic culture of the Venetian period, and a cuisine heavily influenced by Italian cooking.

The old town of Corfu, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2007, is the most intact example of Venetian urban architecture in Greece. Its narrow alleyways, known as kantounia, run between tall shuttered houses in shades of ochre, sienna, and rose, laundry strung between the upper floors, the smell of jasmine and bougainvillea drifting through the evening air. The Liston, a colonnaded promenade modeled on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris and built during the French occupation of the early nineteenth century, faces the Esplanade, the large open space in the heart of the town that was originally a Venetian-era defensive clearing. Cricket, introduced by the British during the protectorate period, is still played on the Esplanade, one of the more improbable legacies of colonial administration.

The Old Fortress on its rocky promontory and the New Fortress on the opposite side of the town were built and repeatedly expanded by the Venetians to defend against Ottoman naval raids. The Old Fortress, which incorporates a Byzantine church converted to an Anglican church during British rule and now restored to Orthodox use, offers panoramic views of the Albanian coast across the narrow strait. The Achilleion Palace, built in the late nineteenth century for the Austro-Hungarian Empress Elisabeth and later purchased by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, stands on a hilltop south of Corfu town and commands panoramic views of the sea. Its eclectic Victorian architecture and gardens adorned with classical statuary including a massive bronze Achilles make it a distinctive experience as an expression of nineteenth-century northern European romanticism's obsession with ancient Greece.

Gerald Durrell's affectionate memoir describing the Durrell family's years on pre-war Corfu has created a distinct literary tourism for the island, with visitors following in the footsteps of the young naturalist among the olive groves and beaches of the northern and eastern coasts. The beaches of Corfu span the full range from crowded resort beaches to the beautiful, relatively quiet beaches of the northwest. Paleokastritsa, a series of small sandy coves on the northwest coast below a Venetian monastery perched on a headland, is among the most beautiful beach settings in the Ionian Islands.

Kefalonia, the largest Ionian island, has dramatic mountain scenery, outstanding beaches including the famous Myrtos Beach with its white pebbles and startlingly blue water, and the Melissani underground lake, an extraordinary geological formation where sunlight filters through a hole in the cave roof to illuminate turquoise water. Zakynthos, known for the Shipwreck Beach image of a rusted freighter surrounded by white pebbles in an impossibly blue cove, is also an important nesting site for the loggerhead sea turtle, Caretta caretta, which comes ashore on the sandy beaches of Laganas Bay from June through August to lay its eggs. Conservation efforts to protect the turtles have sometimes brought them into conflict with the demands of beach tourism, and responsible visitors are asked to avoid the nesting beaches during the night and morning hours. Ithaka, the legendary home of Odysseus, is one of the smallest Ionian islands and one of the most evocative for travelers with a connection to Homer's Odyssey. The island's dramatic scenery, winding roads, and quiet fishing villages make it one of the most genuinely peaceful destinations in the Ionian group.

The North Aegean Islands

The North Aegean Islands, lying close to the Turkish coast and often bypassed by travelers focused on the more famous Cyclades and Dodecanese, constitute some of the most rewarding destinations in the Greek island world, combining natural beauty with an authenticity and cultural depth that the more heavily touristed islands have partially lost.

Lesbos, the third-largest Greek island at over seventeen hundred square kilometers, is famous internationally as the birthplace of the lyric poet Sappho, one of the greatest poets of antiquity, whose fragments celebrating love and beauty in the Aeolian dialect of Greek have survived the millennia to retain their extraordinary emotional power. The island today is a place of considerable natural beauty: its petrified forest, a UNESCO Global Geopark, preserves the fossilized remains of a subtropical forest buried by volcanic ash fifteen to twenty million years ago; its olive groves, among the most extensive in Greece, produce the olive oil that is one of the island's primary exports; and its therapeutic hot springs at Thermi, Eftalou, and Polichnitos attract visitors seeking the mineral waters that have been prized since antiquity. Mytilini, the island's capital, is a substantial town with a Byzantine castle, a fine archaeological museum, and a lively waterfront.

Chios, between Lesbos and Samos, is famous throughout Greece and beyond for its mastiha, the resin produced by incising the bark of lentisk trees in the southern part of the island. The mastic villages of southern Chios, collectively known as the Mastichochoria, are among the most architecturally distinctive settlements in all of Greece: their dense clusters of gray and white geometric facades, decorated with complex painted patterns in a style called xysta, were designed to be defensible against pirate raids, and the villages huddle together with their shared walls and narrow internal passages forming a kind of collective fortification. The mastiha harvested here has been traded since antiquity: the ancient Egyptians used it for embalming, Roman ladies chewed it to sweeten their breath, the Ottomans valued it so highly that they exempted the mastic villages from many of the hardships of Ottoman rule. Today mastiha flavors everything from liqueur to ice cream to chewing gum to cosmetics, and the Mastichochoria are a fascinating cultural tourism destination.

Samos, the birthplace of the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras and the astronomer Aristarchus, lies so close to the Turkish coast that the narrow strait between the island and the mainland at some points narrows to less than two kilometers. The Heraion, the great sanctuary of the goddess Hera on the island, was one of the most important religious sites in the ancient Greek world, and its surviving column, one of the original hundred and twenty of the forest of columns that made the temple one of the largest in the ancient world, stands in the flat plain near the coast as a solitary sentinel. The Pythagorion, the ancient capital of Samos, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose monuments include the Eupalinos Tunnel, an aqueduct built in the sixth century BCE by the engineer Eupalinos, which was simultaneously cut from both ends of the mountain and met in the middle with a precision of alignment that was a wonder of ancient engineering.

The Epirus Region and Zagori

The Epirus region of northwestern Greece, bordering Albania to the north and Macedonia to the east, is one of the least-visited areas of the country by international travelers and one of the most rewarding. Its landscape is dominated by the Pindus mountain range, which reaches its highest and most dramatic expression here, with deep gorges, ancient forest, rushing rivers, and traditional villages of exceptional architectural beauty.

The Zagori region, a collection of forty-six villages on the northern slopes of the Pindus surrounding the Vikos Gorge, is one of the most perfectly preserved examples of traditional vernacular architecture in the Balkans. The Zagorian villages, built in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries by wealthy merchants and craftsmen who had made their fortunes across the Ottoman Empire, are characterized by their substantial stone mansions, their arched bridges, their cobblestone streets, and the dense forests of oak, beech, and black pine that surround them. The villages were prosperous enough to resist the worst effects of Ottoman exploitation, and their isolation protected them from the destruction of the Greek War of Independence. Today they are experiencing a careful revival as destinations for visitors seeking traditional architecture, mountain walking, and authentic Greek village life at its most genuine.

The Vikos Gorge, the centerpiece of the Vikos-Aoos National Park, is one of the deepest gorges in the world relative to its width, with walls plunging over nine hundred meters from the plateau above to the river below. The walk through the gorge from the village of Monodendri to Vikos takes approximately five to seven hours and is one of the finest day walks in Greece, passing through extraordinary scenery of towering limestone walls, dense riparian forest, and crystal-clear springs. The villages of Papingo, at the northern end of the gorge, are among the most beautiful in Greece, their gray stone houses and their extraordinary mountain setting combining to create a landscape of exceptional beauty.

The city of Ioannina, the capital of Epirus, is a substantial city on the shores of Lake Pamvotis with a history that includes centuries as an important Ottoman administrative center. Its fortress, the Kastro, projects on a peninsula into the lake and contains the old Ottoman quarters, a mosque, and the museum dedicated to Ali Pasha of Ioannina, the Albanian-born Ottoman governor who made Ioannina the capital of a quasi-independent state in the early nineteenth century and whose dealings with Napoleon, Lord Byron, and the Greek independence movement make him one of the most colorful figures in the history of the region. Ioannina is famous throughout Greece for its silverwork tradition and for its exceptional baklava, the finest version of the Ottoman sweet pastry found in any Greek city.

Sports and Outdoor Activities

Greece offers an extraordinary range of outdoor activities driven by its combination of mountains, sea, gorges, forests, and excellent climate. The country that gave the world the Olympic Games remains a place of serious athletic culture, and its natural landscape provides opportunities for activities ranging from mild walks to technical climbing.

Hiking and trekking are among the most rewarding ways to experience Greece's natural landscape. The E4 European long-distance trail passes through Greece from east to west, entering at the Bulgarian border and crossing the mainland before descending through the Peloponnese and continuing through Crete. Sections of this route through the Pindus mountains, the Zagori, Mount Olympus, and the White Mountains of Crete are among the finest mountain walking in Europe. The Samaria Gorge walk in Crete, the Vikos Gorge walk in Epirus, and the summit route to Mytikas on Olympus are the three most celebrated long walks in the country. The network of marked hiking trails in the Peloponnese, particularly the Menalon Trail through the Arcadian highlands, offers excellent multi-day routes through beautiful and little-visited terrain.

Rock climbing has developed rapidly as an activity in Greece, with internationally rated crags at Meteora, Kalymnos in the Dodecanese, Leonidio in the Peloponnese, and numerous locations throughout the mainland and islands. Kalymnos, a small island that has become one of the most famous sport climbing destinations in the world, attracts climbers from across Europe and beyond for its extraordinary limestone crags, traditional climbing culture, and warm autumn season that makes it accessible when the northern European crags are cold and wet.

Water sports of every description are available throughout the Greek islands and coastal regions. Windsurfing has been popular in Greece since the 1970s, with the Meltemi wind making the Aegean one of the world's premier windsurfing destinations. The island of Paros, particularly the bay at Pounda, is among the most famous windsurfing destinations in Europe. Kitesurfing, a more recent development, has found excellent conditions at several locations. Sailing is perhaps the quintessential Greek experience for the water-oriented traveler: the combination of reliable summer winds, protected anchorages, well-spaced islands, and excellent marine infrastructure makes the Aegean one of the premier sailing destinations in the world. Bareboat charter is widely available for experienced sailors, and guided flotilla holidays allow less experienced sailors to explore the islands with the security of a professional skipper available.

Scuba diving, though subject to more restrictions than in many countries due to the protection of underwater archaeological sites, is available in designated areas throughout the coast and islands. The clear Aegean water, with horizontal visibility sometimes exceeding thirty meters, and the rich marine life of the eastern Mediterranean make underwater exploration in Greece visually rewarding. Snorkeling is possible almost everywhere along the coast and requires no certification or permit.