The Other Greece: A 12-Day Private Journey Through Athens, Spetses & Monemvasia

A walking tour built for your first day, when what you want is to stretch your legs and get your bearings rather than climb anything.

Your local guide meets you at the hotel and walks you into the historical centre. You get a feel for a city that has been lived in for 4,000 years, pass the landmarks of both the ancient and the modern town, stop where the views are worth stopping for, and eat the first of many good things.

The useful part is the talking. Your guide answers your questions about the city, the people and the culture, and hands you the practical information for the days ahead: which restaurants, which shops, picked to suit you rather than everyone.

You finish the day knowing your way around, which is the whole point.

You meet your state-licensed guide and go straight to the reason most people come to Athens. Then the museum built for it, and an hour on foot through the old town, with ruins along the way.

Climb the sacred rock and the Parthenon is in front of you, one of the most important pieces of architecture ever built. Your guide takes you through what Athens achieved up here in its Golden Age, and it lands differently standing on the spot.

Then the Acropolis Museum, which draws visitors from all over the world and earns it. Every floor is full: artefacts, sculptures, antiquities, the depth of the city’s heritage laid out in order.

You finish in Plaka, the old neighbourhood under the rock, with its whitewashed houses and narrow cobbled lanes. Ancient and modern sit on top of each other here without any apparent effort.

To carry on afterwards, ask your guide. Athens has turned itself into a contemporary metropolis without giving up any of its heritage, and folded the ancient parts into the modern city rather than fencing them off.

Inclusions

• 5-hour private guided tour
• Hotel pick-up (walking)
• 2-hour visit to the Acropolis Site
• 2-hour visit to the New Acropolis Museum
• 1-hour Plaka guided walking tour
• Private services of a state-licensed guide
• Entrance fees

History, natural beauty, a cosmopolitan crowd and water you can see straight through. Spetses is the prettiest island in the Saronic Gulf and close enough to Athens that Athenians come for the weekend.

The alleys of Spetses town are traditional architecture the whole way: neoclassical houses, mansions, and the captains’ houses that were built to be noticed. Cars are banned on the island, which is the single thing you notice most, because it is quiet.

The heart of it is Dapia, the port, and its square, the meeting point for residents and visitors alike. In the middle of Poseidon Square stands the statue of Laskarina Bouboulina. Take a horse carriage through the town if there is any romance in you at all. Go near sunset, when the light does the rest.

This is Spetses, the island of the captains.

Spetses is stylish, has real history and gives you plenty of ways to spend a day.

Start at Dapia, the harbour, for the neoclassical architecture and the noise of a working port. Then the Bouboulina Museum, which is her actual mansion, and the story of a heroine of the Greek War of Independence told in the rooms she lived in. The Spetses Museum is in the Hadziyiannis Mexis Mansion, and its collection runs from antiquity to the 19th century.

For the beach, Agia Marina is the popular one, good for swimming, sunbathing and water sports. Zogeria is the other kind: quieter, further out, and worth the trip for exactly that reason.

In the evening, walk the Old Harbour. Tavernas, boutiques, and the sea in front of you. Between the history, the beaches and the general elegance of the place, Spetses is a rare island that gives you culture and rest in the same day.

A coastline full of coves, private beaches, water you can see the bottom of, and a crowd that could go anywhere and chose here.

Porto Heli is built around a natural harbour and known as the Monaco of Greece, which tells you who holidays here: prominent Greeks, jet setters, members of European royal families. A brand-new model marina sits in the centre of the bay with serious maritime infrastructure behind it, and Spetses is fifteen minutes away by boat.

The coastal road is lined with shops all the way round to the far side, where the moored boats are. Everything is here: the clear-water beaches, the Mediterranean landscape around them, the famous resorts, the marinas, the fresh seafood, the nightlife, and the view across to Spetses.

This is Porto Heli, where discreet luxury meets the jet setters.

A day with nothing in it, on the eastern coast of the Peloponnese. That is the point.

Walk the marina, look at the yachts, sit somewhere with a coffee. The cafés and restaurants in town do fresh seafood and proper Greek cooking, and there is no reason to hurry over either.

For a beach, Hinitsa Bay and Ververonda are both close and both quiet. And if that is still too much sitting still, a short boat ride puts you on Spetses or Hydra for the day.

A drive through the green middle of the Peloponnese and then a UNESCO World Heritage site with the best-preserved ancient theatre anywhere.

It was built in the 4th century BC, and the acoustics are what everyone tests: the faintest sound from the centre reaches every seat, right to the back row. It still hosts performances, and they still work.

Epidaurus is also, by myth, where Asklepios was born, the god of medicine and healing and the son of Apollo. In the sanctuary beside the theatre you are standing where ancient medicine happened, at the point where the spiritual and the scientific started to meet. Pilgrims came here from across the ancient world looking for a cure. The temples, healing chambers and sacred baths are still there, and the Asklepian cults that used them are a foundation stone of medicine as a science.

Inclusions

• 1.5-hour private guided tour
• Private services of a state-licensed guide
• Entrance fees

A medieval tower town on the south-eastern coast of the Peloponnese, founded by the Byzantines in the sixth century and built in stone on the edge of a huge rock in the sea.

Time starts running backwards the moment you pass through the gate. The fortress has been held by the Byzantines, the Crusaders, the Venetians and the Turks, which is why it is called the Gibraltar of the East. The streets are narrow cobblestone, the stone buildings have been restored properly, and you can spend the night in a tower and have dinner on the roof of a tower house.

A castle town carved into a sea rock in the medieval period, where Byzantine, Venetian and Ottoman building sit on top of one another and the history is genuinely complicated. In the cobbled alleys you find Byzantine and Venetian churches next to Ottoman remains, a mosque and a hamam among them.

Monemvasia had rich centuries and violent ones. It traded, it was sacked, and it was known in the West as Malvasia, which is where the wine got its name.

Walking through, with the sea breeze coming up over the walls, you get the views and then the churches: Hagia Sophia and Helkomenos, and the ruins spread across the upper and the lower town. Every street here has been walked for a very long time.

Inclusions

• 2-hour private guided experience
• Hotel pick up (walking – on foot)
• Private services of a state licensed guide

A day to walk Monemvasia at your own pace, which is the only sensible way to do it.

Through the arched gateway and you are in a medieval fortress town: cobbled streets between old stone houses, Byzantine churches at the end of them. Climb to the ruins of the upper town, where the Church of Agia Sophia sits on the cliff edge with the sea a long way below.

Down in the lower town there are tavernas, cafés and small shops, so the history comes with lunch. Between the setting and how much of the architecture has survived intact, this is the one place in the Peloponnese nobody should skip.

Today you say goodbye to Greece. The places, the people and the experiences come with you.

You will go back through the photographs and the souvenirs, and work out how to tell people about it. After you arrive at Athens International Airport, you check in for your international flight and leave. The trip is over for now, though that rarely turns out to be permanent.