Athens travel guide: how to plan your trip

Almost every trip to Greece passes through Athens, and most of them give it a day and a half. That is usually a mistake, but not always, and which it is depends on what else you are doing. The city is also the door to the islands, so how you plan the joins matters as much as what you see here.

Getting there

You are almost certainly arriving through Athens airport already, so the useful question is how you get in from it and out to the boats.

• Airport to the centre, by metro on line 3, by express bus, or by private transfer, which is the one we book when there is luggage and a ferry the same day.
• Out to Piraeus, the main port, for almost every island route.
• Out to Rafina, which is closer to the airport than Piraeus is and serves Mykonos, Andros and Tinos.

The joins are where trips go wrong. How much time to leave between a landing and a sailing is a question we answer constantly, and the honest answer depends on which port and which month.

How many days

Three nights minimum. Four is where Athens starts to work.

Most people race through, see the Acropolis and move on, which is understandable when time is short and the islands are calling. But if you can give Athens another day or two, it repays you.

It is a cosmopolitan city that runs around the clock, and it is also one of the few cities in the world that has been continuously lived in for more than three thousand years. That is what makes it interesting. The ancient world is not sitting separately behind a fence here. Modern Athens has simply grown around it.

So give yourself time to wander, to eat, to sit in a neighbourhood cafe, to find a street you were not looking for, and to see what the city does after dark. The Acropolis is the reason many people come to Athens. It should not be the reason they leave.

Where to stay

For most visitors, the city centre. It puts you within easy walking distance of the major sights, all of which sit within a kilometre or two, and it means you do not waste half your holiday working out how to get from one to the next.

The real advantage is what happens between the sights. Athens is a city best seen on foot. You leave one place, take a wrong turn, stop for a coffee, wander down a laneway, find a small restaurant, and realise you have spent two hours doing nothing that was on your itinerary.

Day trips worth taking

Two we recommend constantly. The three island day cruise, which gets you out on the water and onto islands without moving hotels. And Cape Sounion for the sunset, at the Temple of Poseidon on the headland, which is the one that surprises people.

If you like wine, there are several day trips out to wineries in the regions around the city, and they are a different day entirely from the archaeology.

All three are linked under Featured day tours on this page.

Time between landing and sailing

This is the join that catches people out.

Worth getting right rather than optimistic.

• International to domestic flight, leave two hours or more in peak season.
• Airport to Piraeus port, allow an hour for the journey itself, before anything else.

Those are the travel times, not the whole margin. You still want room on top for bags, for the walk to the right gate at a very large port, and for the traffic being what it is. We book the crossing around your flight rather than in spite of it, which is the point of asking us instead of guessing.