Greece travel health
Required is not recommended: the first is what the border asks about, the second is what a clinic would suggest. Both, for Greece, then the number to dial and what care costs a visitor. Applies to every guide in Greece: Santorini, Athens, Mykonos, Crete, Rhodes, Meteora and 27 more.
Required to enter
Nothing. No vaccination certificate is asked for at the border.
Recommended
- Routine vaccinations up to date
Emergency number
112, or 166 for an ambulance
Care for visitors
Good and affordable
EU/EEA and Swiss visitors are treated on the same terms as residents with an EHIC or GHIC card; UK visitors use a GHIC. Everyone else pays, and travel insurance is worth having for the repatriation cover rather than the treatment. Island clinics handle basics; anything serious means a transfer to Athens or Crete, which is quick but not instant.
Summer heat is the most common reason tourists need help — heatstroke and dehydration, not accidents.
The general rules — clinic timing, water, mosquitoes, insurance — are in travel health tips.
The guides in Greece
SantoriniGreeceWhite villages on the rim of a drowned volcano
AthensGreeceAncient ruins above a restless modern city
MykonosGreeceWhite cubes, windmills and the loudest beach clubs in the Aegean, with the sacred island of Delos next door
CreteGreeceAn island big enough to have its own mountains, its own cuisine and its own opinion of Greece
RhodesGreeceA walled medieval city that people still live in, and three hundred days of sun off the Turkish coast
MeteoraGreeceSix monasteries on top of rock pillars, built where nobody could reach them
CorfuGreeceVenetian arcades and cricket in the square, on the greenest island in Greece
NaxosGreeceThe biggest Cyclade, with mountain villages, marble quarries and the longest sandy beaches in the islands
ParosGreeceThe Cyclades without the price of Santorini: a marble island of white villages, a windsurfing bay, and ferries to everywhere
MilosGreeceA 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 here
ZakynthosGreeceThe 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 end
SkiathosGreeceSixty 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 Aegean
DelphiGreeceThe 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 years
IosGreeceAn 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 to
KefaloniaGreeceThe 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 it
LefkadaGreeceAn island you drive onto across a floating bridge, with the most photographed beaches in Greece under white cliffs on the west coast
KosGreeceA flat island you cycle across, with a Roman city in the middle of the town, Hippocrates’ plane tree, and Turkey close enough to see
SymiGreeceA 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 whole
SkopelosGreeceA 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 tourism
HydraGreeceAn 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 away
SpetsesGreeceA pine-covered island of shipowners’ mansions and horse-drawn carriages, where cars are mostly banned and Athens is two hours by boat
ThessalonikiGreeceGreece’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 bed
HalkidikiGreeceThree 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 enter
NafplioGreeceThe 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 road
OlympiaGreeceWhere 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 museum
MonemvasiaGreeceA 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 cliff
SifnosGreeceThe 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 on
FolegandrosGreeceA 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 Cyclades
KarpathosGreeceA 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 capital
PatmosGreeceThe island where Revelation was written, in a cave you can still go into, under a monastery that looks like a fortress and rules the skyline
ZagoriGreeceForty-six stone villages in the mountains of Epirus, linked by arched packhorse bridges, above a gorge that is among the deepest in the world
PelionGreeceThe mountain of the centaurs: cobbled villages in chestnut forest on one side, empty Aegean beaches on the other, and a narrow-gauge train between them
SamosGreeceA 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