Peloponnese map: the loop from Athens, and what is on it

The drive

The loop, stage by stage

Seven legs, anticlockwise, starting and finishing in Athens. Distances are road distances and the times are driving times with no stops in them. Nothing here is longer than three and three quarter hours at the wheel, and only two legs pass two hours.

How far everything is from Athens

This is the table the search results for this region do not have, and it settles most of the planning arguments on its own. Everything below is measured from central Athens unless the group heading says otherwise.

Where the Peloponnese actually is

South-west of Athens, hanging off the bottom of the Greek mainland, and shaped like a hand with four fingers pointing into the sea. It covers about 21,500 square kilometres, a little more than Wales, and roughly a million people live on it. The Gulf of Corinth runs along its northern edge and separates it from central Greece for 130 km; at the eastern end that gulf closes to a 6 km neck of land, the isthmus, which is the only place the peninsula ever touched the rest of the country.

It has been an island since 1893, when the Corinth canal was finally cut through that neck after two thousand years of people trying. Nero started it in AD 67 with six thousand Jewish prisoners and gave up; before and after him, ships were dragged overland on a paved slipway called the Diolkos. The canal that exists is 6.4 km long, 25 m wide at the water and cut 90 m deep through solid rock, which makes it spectacular to look down into and almost useless to modern shipping. Nothing wider than a small cruise ship fits, and it has been closed for landslip repairs more than once in recent years.

None of which matters when you are driving. Several bridges cross the canal, including the motorway, and the two at each end submerge into the water to let boats through rather than lifting. There is a second road in as well, further west: the Rio-Antirrio bridge, a 2.9 km cable-stayed crossing opened in 2004, which links Patras to the mainland north and is the route you take if you are coming down from Delphi or Meteora rather than out of Athens.

The middle of the peninsula is the part the map explains best. It is mountain: Ziria and Chelmos in the north both pass 2,300 m, Menalo in Arcadia reaches 1,981 m, and Taygetos in the south is the high point of the whole peninsula at 2,404 m. The roads go around all of it rather than through it, which is why the loop is a ring and not a star. It also explains why the four fingers feel like separate countries: getting from the Mani to Messenia means going up and over, and the people who live on them have never had much reason to.

The six places the loop is built around

Ancient Corinth is the one people skip and the one that sets up the rest. It was the richest city in Greece because it controlled the isthmus and charged for it, and Saint Paul spent eighteen months preaching in it. Seven columns of the temple of Apollo are still standing, and the Acrocorinth above is a fortress the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Franks, Venetians and Ottomans each rebuilt in turn. An hour and a half, and the car park is at the gate.

Mycenae is a thousand years older than anything else on the loop. This was the centre of the civilisation that the Iliad remembers, at its height around 1350 BC and burnt by 1100 BC, and Schliemann dug the gold death masks out of the grave circle inside the walls in 1876. The Lion Gate at the entrance is the oldest monumental sculpture in Europe still standing where it was raised. Allow ninety minutes with the Treasury of Atreus down the hill, and go before eleven, because the citadel is a bare rock with no shade.

Nafplio is not a site, it is the base, and it is the reason the eastern half of this trip is comfortable. Venetian and Ottoman in turn, capital of the new Greek state from 1829 to 1834, with marble streets, a fortress reached by a staircase everyone calls 999 steps and nobody has ever counted at more than about 850 and a small castle on an islet in the middle of the bay. Everything in the Argolid is inside an hour of it. Two nights here beats one night each in three different towns, and it is the only place on the loop with a proper choice of what you get for the money in Greece.

Epidaurus is thirty minutes east of Nafplio and holds the best preserved theatre in the Greek world. It was built into the hillside around 340 BC, it seats 14,000, and the acoustics work so precisely that a whisper on the orchestra floor carries to the back row. The sanctuary of Asclepius around it was a healing centre, which is what the theatre was there to serve. Two hours, and if your dates fall in July or August, check the Athens and Epidaurus Festival before booking anything else.

Mystras is the one nobody expects. A Byzantine city built up the flank of Mount Taygetos from 1249, capital of the Despotate of the Morea, and the last significant Byzantine centre to fall to the Ottomans in 1460. It was lived in until the 1830s, when the new state built Sparta on the plain below and everyone moved down, so what stands is a town rather than a ruin: churches with their frescoes intact, a palace, monasteries still occupied by nuns. It is steep and it takes three hours. Ancient Sparta, 6 km away, is almost nothing, which is the joke history played on the Spartans.

Olympia is the far corner of the loop and the reason to go the long way round. The games were held here every four years from 776 BC until a Christian emperor banned them in AD 393, and the site is a valley of pines and fallen columns with the stadium still marked out at the end of it. The museum next door has the Hermes of Praxiteles and the pediments from the temple of Zeus, and it is the better half of the visit. Half a day, and it is the only stop on the loop that does not work as a day trip from anywhere.

What the loop misses, and what each one costs you

The classic week stays on the archaeology and keeps to the north and the east. Everything in small blue on the map is the second trip, and three of them are strong enough to bend the first one.

The Mani costs two days and changes the character of the whole holiday. The middle finger of the peninsula is a spine of bare limestone with stone tower houses stacked in villages that fought each other into the twentieth century, and a road that runs down the west coast through Kardamyli and Stoupa before the trees give out entirely. Cape Tenaro at the bottom is the southernmost point of mainland Greece, and only Tarifa in Spain reaches further south on the European mainland. It had a temple to Poseidon that the ancients took for an entrance to the underworld. Add it between Mystras and Kalamata and it slots into the loop rather than extending it.

Monemvasia costs a day and a half and is the hardest one to fit, because it hangs off the south-east and nothing else is near it. A Byzantine town on the landward face of a 300 m rock, joined to the coast by a single causeway, with no cars allowed inside the walls and a gate you walk through into a street of stone houses and one main square. Stay the night rather than looking at it: the day visitors leave by six and the place is transformed.

Voidokilia and Pylos cost half a day if you are already going to Olympia, because they sit on the same west coast road. Voidokilia is a perfect semicircle of sand between two headlands with a lagoon behind it and a Frankish castle on the cliff above, and it is the best beach on the peninsula by a distance. Pylos below it is where the naval battle of Navarino was fought in 1827, which is a large part of the reason Greece is a country.

The Diakofto rack railway costs three hours and fits into the drive home. A narrow-gauge line built in 1896 climbs 22 km up the Vouraikos gorge from the coast to Kalavryta, on rack and pinion where the gradient passes one in seven, through tunnels cut in the rock face with the river directly below. It is an hour each way and the station is 200 m off the motorway.

Getting there, and why you end up driving

There are three ways onto the peninsula and two of them are Athens. Athens airport sits 33 km east of the city, on the wrong side of it for the Peloponnese, but the ring road takes you round without going through the centre and you are at the canal about an hour and a quarter after leaving the terminal. Kalamata airport in the south takes seasonal flights from a handful of European cities between May and October and is the smarter arrival if the Mani and Messenia are what you came for. Patras, in the north-west corner, takes the ferries from Bari, Brindisi, Ancona and Venice, which is how a good number of people arrive with a car already.

No ferry is involved in reaching the Peloponnese itself, which is worth saying because it is the single biggest difference between this region and the rest of Greece. Everything else worth seeing here involves a boat and a timetable, and a cancelled sailing costs you a day. Here the weather does not decide your itinerary and nothing sells out in August except hotel rooms.

Public transport gets you between towns and abandons you at the sites. KTEL buses run from the Kifissos terminal in Athens to Nafplio, Tripoli, Sparta, Kalamata and Patras several times a day, and the suburban railway runs along the north coast as far as Kiato and Aigio. What none of them do is cover the last five to thirty kilometres: Mycenae, Mystras, Epidaurus and Olympia all sit off the main roads, and reaching them without a car means a taxi from the nearest town or an organised tour. This is not a region where you can improvise on buses the way you can move around Athens on the metro.

How many days it actually takes

Three days covers the Argolid and nothing else, and it is a real trip rather than a compromise. Athens to Corinth and Mycenae on the first day, two nights in Nafplio, Epidaurus on the second morning, home on the third. About 350 km in total. You will not have seen Olympia or Mystras and you should not pretend otherwise.

Five days is the full loop with the corners cut. Same start, then Nafplio to Mystras on day three, Mystras to Olympia on day four over the Langada pass, and the long run home on day five. Two of those five days are three-hour drives and you arrive at Olympia in the afternoon rather than the morning, which matters in July. It works, and it is tighter than it looks on paper.

Seven days is the answer. Two nights in Nafplio, a night near Sparta or Kardamyli, a night in Olympia, and a spare day that you spend either on the Mani or on the rack railway depending on the weather. Every site gets the half day it needs, no day has more than two and a half hours of driving in it, and there is room for a long lunch in Kardamyli or Nafplio without anyone looking at the clock.

Ten days brings in Monemvasia and the bottom of the Mani properly, and it is also when adding an island starts to make sense, because Kythira sits off the south-east tip and Zakynthos is a short crossing from the west coast. Beyond that the peninsula does not really reward more time in one go, and the six island groups laid out across both Greek seas are a better use of a fortnight than a second week here.

One thing to get right whichever length you choose. The Peloponnese is at its best in April, May, September and October, and it is genuinely hard work in the middle of summer: Mycenae and Olympia are open sites with no shade, inland Arcadia and the Evrotas valley regularly pass 38 °C in July, and none of it is cooled by the sea breeze that makes the islands bearable. If you can only come in August, do the sites at opening and keep the driving for the middle of the day, when the car has air conditioning and the ruins do not.