Greece travel tips

Best time to visit Greece

Every guide's best months, checked against its own thirty-year rainfall: a filled month is recommended, a hatched one has over 250 mm of rain. Most of Greece agrees on May, Jun, Sep, Oct.

best month · over 250 mm · the letters are the months, January to December.

The guides in Greece

SantoriniGreeceWhite villages on the rim of a drowned volcanoAthensGreeceAncient ruins above a restless modern cityMykonosGreeceWhite cubes, windmills and the loudest beach clubs in the Aegean, with the sacred island of Delos next doorCreteGreeceAn island big enough to have its own mountains, its own cuisine and its own opinion of GreeceRhodesGreeceA walled medieval city that people still live in, and three hundred days of sun off the Turkish coastMeteoraGreeceSix monasteries on top of rock pillars, built where nobody could reach themCorfuGreeceVenetian arcades and cricket in the square, on the greenest island in GreeceNaxosGreeceThe biggest Cyclade, with mountain villages, marble quarries and the longest sandy beaches in the islandsParosGreeceThe Cyclades without the price of Santorini: a marble island of white villages, a windsurfing bay, and ferries to everywhereMilosGreeceA volcanic island of seventy beaches, none of them alike: white rock carved by the sea, a fishing village with boat garages under the houses, and the Venus de Milo came from hereZakynthosGreeceThe shipwreck in a white cove that every Greek poster shows, blue caves along the cliffs, and loggerhead turtles nesting on the bay at the other endSkiathosGreeceSixty beaches on a small green island, an airport where the planes come in over the road, and the pine forest behind the most photographed sand in the AegeanDelphiGreeceThe place the Greeks called the navel of the world: a sanctuary on a mountainside above a sea of olive trees, where the oracle spoke for a thousand yearsIosGreeceAn island with two reputations: a hill village that parties until dawn, and a coast of empty beaches and a poet’s grave that almost nobody walks toKefaloniaGreeceThe biggest Ionian island: an underground lake you row across, a beach between white cliffs that is on every calendar, and a mountain with wild horses on itLefkadaGreeceAn island you drive onto across a floating bridge, with the most photographed beaches in Greece under white cliffs on the west coastKosGreeceA flat island you cycle across, with a Roman city in the middle of the town, Hippocrates’ plane tree, and Turkey close enough to seeSymiGreeceA harbour of neoclassical houses in ochre and blue stacked up both sides of a bay, five hundred steps from the port to the old town, and shrimp you eat wholeSkopelosGreeceA green island of pine and plum orchards where they filmed the chapel on the rock, with a harbour town of slate roofs and almost no package tourismHydraGreeceAn island with no cars at all: everything moves by donkey or on foot, a harbour of stone mansions built by shipowners, and Athens an hour and a half awaySpetsesGreeceA pine-covered island of shipowners’ mansions and horse-drawn carriages, where cars are mostly banned and Athens is two hours by boatThessalonikiGreeceGreece’s second city and the one Greeks say eats best: a Roman rotunda, Byzantine churches, a waterfront to walk at sunset, and a student population that never goes to bedHalkidikiGreeceThree peninsulas off Thessaloniki: one for the beaches, one for the pine forest and the quiet, and one that is a monastic republic women may not enterNafplioGreeceThe first capital of modern Greece: a Venetian old town under two castles, with a third on an islet in the bay and Mycenae and Epidaurus down the roadOlympiaGreeceWhere the games were held for a thousand years: a sanctuary in a green river valley, the original stadium you can still run in, and the Hermes of Praxiteles in the museumMonemvasiaGreeceA Byzantine town on a rock joined to the mainland by a causeway, invisible from the shore, with no cars inside and a church at the top of the cliffSifnosGreeceThe island Greeks go to for the food: a chef whose cookbook shaped the country, three hundred chapels, and a footpath network you can cross the island onFolegandrosGreeceA village on a 200-metre cliff with the sea straight down from the square, almost no beaches you can drive to, and the quietest evening in the CycladesKarpathosGreeceA long thin island between Crete and Rhodes where a mountain village still speaks a dialect with words Homer used, and the wind makes it a kitesurfing capitalPatmosGreeceThe island where Revelation was written, in a cave you can still go into, under a monastery that looks like a fortress and rules the skylineZagoriGreeceForty-six stone villages in the mountains of Epirus, linked by arched packhorse bridges, above a gorge that is among the deepest in the worldPelionGreeceThe mountain of the centaurs: cobbled villages in chestnut forest on one side, empty Aegean beaches on the other, and a narrow-gauge train between themSamosGreeceA green island a mile from Turkey, with a tunnel dug through a mountain in the sixth century BC, the sweet wine it exports, and Pythagoras born here