A Greece Travel Guide: Where to Stay and What to Do

Traveling the world is one of life’s greatest pleasures. If you are lucky enough to be getting out of your house and seeing the world, you’re already doing something right. There is something beautiful about indulging wanderlust, particularly when it gives way to drinking entirely different cultures.

Greece is a country well worth visiting in this regard, being an origin point for much of modern civilization. It should be a bucket list destination for any traveler worth their salt – but for the uninitiated, where do you start?

Where to Stay

Greece is a particularly large country to navigate and explore, consisting of nearly 60 thousand square miles and over six thousand islands (though little more than 200 are actually inhabited). As such, choosing where to lay down your hat can be difficult. Santorini puts you right in the middle of the Aegean Sea, the perfect place from which to island-hop; on the opposite side of the country, the isle of Corfu puts you in the middle of the nightlife and a stone’s throw from the mainland.

But Greece might be part of a wider Europe tour you have planned, wherein you hop across borders and see the breadth of cultural experience the continent has to offer. If this is the case, a city hub makes more sense as an easy location to travel in and out of – both locally and internationally speaking. What better, then, than Athens? Greece’s capital is a coastal delight and multicultural hub, with its own incredible attractions and excellent transport connections. 

What to Do

The above locations are incredible choices for overnight stays or even your ‘base camp’ for your holiday, purely on the merit of their atmosphere and the views they offer. But Greece has so much more to offer in terms of activities, events and must-visit locations that ‘doing’ deserves a whole separate plan to ‘staying’.

Athens is an excellent city to explore on its own merits, being home to the Acropolis – perhaps the biggest draw for tourists around the world. However, a short drive north of the capital takes you to Tatoi, a forest paradise and former royal garden that offers unparalleled peace and tranquility. 

Much further north, you’ll find Mount Olympus – a mountain of myth, the cradle of the gods, standing tall and proud a short way away from Thessaloniki. Olympus is a mountain begging to be climbed; do not leave Greece without at least setting foot on its path.

When Should You Go?

Choosing when to vacation in Greece is a nice problem to have – especially when no time is especially awful to go. Indeed, though the winters can get surprisingly cold in Greece, the off-season is also an ‘on season’ atop Mount Parnassos, where a fully-fledged ski season begins.

Still, Greece may not be a first choice for winter sports – and that’s fine. If you are sightseeing and drinking in the culture, the best time to go could well be early spring. Other tourists haven’t caught on yet, and the weather is warming up without getting as uncomfortable as those deep summer days can be.