A weekend escape to Nafplio — Greece's most beautiful small city

Somebody in Athens told me to go to Nafplio on a Friday afternoon and come back Sunday evening and I thought: “two hours each way is a lot of driving for a small town.” I was, as I often am about places I haven’t visited, entirely wrong.

Nafplio is the former capital of the modern Greek state — the city where Greece’s first president, Kapodistrias, governed from 1827 to his assassination in 1831 outside a church whose bullet-hole is still visible in the door frame. Before that it was Venetian, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Mycenaean in its foundations. After that it was superseded by Athens and left alone, which is the best thing that could have happened to it: the city has its layers intact and its scale completely human.

Walking Nafplio’s Old Town for the first time is a slightly dizzying experience. The streets are narrow and paved with flagstones; the buildings shift between Venetian palazzo, Ottoman-era townhouse and 19th-century Neoclassical with no visible acknowledgment that these periods are different; the smell alternates between sea air, bougainvillea and coffee.

Getting there and timing

From Athens, Nafplio is 2 hours by car via the E94 motorway through Corinth — one of the better driving experiences in Greece, with good roads and increasingly interesting landscape as you descend into the Peloponnese. Bus is also viable: KTEL buses depart from the Kifissos terminal in Athens and take about 2.5 hours.

September is close to ideal for this trip — the tourist peak is past, the sea is warm, the evenings are cool enough for sitting outside in a jacket. The town fills with Greek domestic tourists on summer weekends but remains manageable by European tourist-season standards.

The Old Town: what to see and how to slow down

The orientation landmarks in Nafplio’s Old Town are Syntagma Square (the original Greek Syntagma, predating Athens’s by decades), the Venetian Bourtzi fortress visible in the harbour, and the long Palamidi fortress climbing vertiginously above the city on its eastern side.

The Palamidi is 999 steps from the town — or accessible by car via a steep winding road — and the view from the top is the best in the Peloponnese. Spend the morning climbing it, allow an hour for the summit, and come down in time for lunch. The fortress itself is Venetian 18th-century and remarkably intact; the cells at the base of the main tower are where the Greek revolutionary leader Kolokotronis was imprisoned by the new state he’d helped create.

Syntagma Square holds the only mosque-turned-cinema-turned-museum in the city and is a good place to start and end an evening wander. The Museum of the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation on Vasileos Alexandrou Street is housed in a beautiful Venetian building and covers Greek textile history in far more depth than you’d expect.

What to eat in Nafplio

The restaurants around Syntagma Square are good rather than exceptional. Walk toward the waterfront — specifically along Bouboulinas Street and then through the back lanes toward the Arvanitia beach path — and you’ll find smaller, less performative places where the cooking is more confident.

Nafplio is particularly good for seafood: the daily catch comes from the Argolic Gulf and arrives at local restaurants the same morning. Grilled sardines, fried whitebait, sea bream baked in salt — these are the things to order. There are also several excellent cheese shops selling local graviera and feta; the regional cheese tradition of the Peloponnese is distinct from the pan-Greek versions you’ll find in Athens.

Day trips from Nafplio: Mycenae and Epidaurus

The reason a Nafplio weekend becomes a genuinely rich experience, rather than just a pleasant break, is the access it provides to two extraordinary sites that are difficult to reach from Athens without a very long day.

Mycenae is 30 minutes from Nafplio. The Bronze Age citadel — throne of Agamemnon, site of the gold treasure now in Athens’s National Archaeological Museum — sits on a hilltop in the middle of the Argolid plain and looks, from a distance, like a natural landform. Up close, the Lion Gate entrance is one of the great carved monuments of the ancient world. The Treasury of Atreus — a beehive tomb a short walk from the main gate — is a single vaulted stone chamber built 3,300 years ago with a precision that remains engineering marvel.

Epidaurus is 45 minutes away. The 4th-century BC theatre there is the best-preserved ancient theatre in Greece — 14,000-seat capacity, perfect acoustics (the drop-a-coin-in-the-centre demonstration still works), and a setting among pine trees that makes the whole site feel isolated from ordinary time. During the summer theatre festival, performances here are genuinely extraordinary.

The Nafplio, Mycenae and Epidaurus small-group tour from Athens covers all three sites in a single structured day — a very efficient option if you’re short on time or prefer guided context for sites of this complexity.

How the weekend lands

By Sunday morning in Nafplio — coffee on Syntagma Square, the fortress above still in shade, the harbour already bright — the city’s particular quality becomes clear. It is exactly the right size: large enough to have character and layers and good restaurants, small enough to have walked every main street by the second evening. It has the density of a Venetian city and the warmth of a Greek town that knows exactly what it is.

For a full breakdown of what Nafplio adds to an Athens trip, the day trips section has the logistics and Athens itineraries show how a Nafplio side trip fits into different trip lengths. For the islands alternative, the Greek islands from Athens guide gives the comparison between the Saronic Gulf islands and the Peloponnese land trip.

Two hours is not far enough away to feel like real travel, but it is far enough to feel like somewhere different. That is precisely the point of Nafplio.