The Most Beautiful Places in Greece
58 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Greece are Navagio, Meteora and Oia. The list covers 58 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Greece is mostly mountain and sea: limestone ranges running down into the Aegean and Ionian, and thousands of islands scattered between them. That geography produced sheltered coves, deep gorges and volcanic calderas, and it also produced the small, fiercely independent cities where classical architecture was invented. Earlier still came the Minoan palaces of Crete; later came Byzantine monks who sought out the most inaccessible rocks they could find.
On the Acropolis of Athens, the Parthenon remains the model of the Doric temple, and below it in the Agora the Temple of Hephaestus survives almost complete because it served for centuries as a church. The Odeon of Herodes Atticus, a Roman theatre on the Acropolis slope, still hosts performances. Knossos on Crete was the largest Minoan palace of the Bronze Age, and Mount Olympus, the country's highest mountain, was the home the Greeks gave their gods. At Meteora, monasteries sit on top of sheer rock pillars in Thessaly.
The islands bring a different mood. Oia perches on the rim of the Santorini caldera, its white houses stepped down the cliff toward the drowned crater left by the great Bronze Age eruption. Navagio on Zakynthos is a cove of white sand enclosed by cliffs, with a rusting shipwreck on the beach. Spinalonga is a small island off Crete fortified by the Venetians and later used as a leper colony. The Samariá Gorge cuts through the White Mountains of Crete to the Libyan Sea, and the Corinth Canal slices through the isthmus between vertical rock walls.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Navagio | Beach | |
| 2 | Meteora | Rock formation | ✓ |
| 3 | Oia | Most beautiful village | |
| 4 | Balos Lagoon | Lagoon | |
| 5 | Parthenon | Ruins | ✓ |
| 6 | Sarakiniko, Milos | Beach | |
| 7 | Monemvasia | Most beautiful village | |
| 8 | Melissani Cave | Show cave | |
| 9 | Mount Olympus | Mountain | |
| 10 | Knossos | Archaeological site | |
| 11 | Odeon of Herodes Atticus | Roman theatre | |
| 12 | Temple of Hephaestus | Ruins | |
| 13 | Spinalonga | Fortress | |
| 14 | Samariá Gorge National Park | Canyon | |
| 15 | Ionian Islands | Island | |
| 16 | Corinth Canal | Canal | |
| 17 | Palamidi | Fortress | |
| 18 | Artemision Bronze | Sculpture | |
| 19 | Santorini | Island | |
| 20 | Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus | Archaeological site | |
| 21 | Vikos Gorge | Canyon | |
| 22 | Voidokilia Beach | Beach | |
| 23 | Hilandar | Monastery | |
| 24 | Charioteer of Delphi | Sculpture | |
| 25 | Hozoviotissa monastery | Monastery | |
| 26 | Daphni Monastery | Monastery | ✓ |
| 27 | Delphi | Archaeological site | |
| 28 | Chania Lighthouse | Lighthouse | |
| 29 | Nea Moni of Chios | Monastery | ✓ |
| 30 | Acropolis of Lindos | Archaeological site |
01 Navagio
Ναυάγιο
Greece37.860° N 20.625° E
dronepicr · CC BY 2.0 The wreck that gives this cove its name ran aground on October 5, 1980. The coaster MV Panagiotis, caught in a storm along Zakynthos's sheer western coastline, was steered — or drove — into the hidden bay, and its crew abandoned the ship there, reportedly while being pursued by the Greek Navy.
Did you know? Before the wreck arrived, the cove was known as Agios Georgios, or Ai Giorgis in local speech, after Saint George.
02 Meteora
Μετέωρα
Greece39.712° N 21.627° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by shogun from Pixabay Monastic life came here before any monastery did. From around the 11th century, hermits climbed into natural fissures and caves high in these sandstone pillars using removable rope ladders — inaccessibility itself was the point, a way of withdrawing from the world that the rock simply handed them.
Did you know? As the story goes, the ropes used to haul monks and pilgrims up in nets were replaced only when the Lord let them break.
03 Oia
Οία Θήρας
Greece36.462° N 25.376° E
Image by FabrizioPonchia from Pixabay Oia stretches for almost two kilometres along the northwestern tip of Santorini, perched on the rim of the caldera 70 to 100 metres above the sea.
Did you know? The 1956 earthquake that devastated the village measured about magnitude 7.8, and its strongest aftershock struck just off Santorini's northern coast.
04 Balos Lagoon
Λιμνοθάλασσα του Μπάλου
Greece · 39.5 km from Chania35.582° N 23.589° E
dronepicr · CC BY 2.0 At the far north-western corner of Crete, the Gramvousa peninsula runs out into the sea as a bare, rocky finger, and at its tip the land nearly touches the offshore islet of Cape Tigani.
Did you know? The rare daisy Anthemis glaberrima, a critically endangered plant, grows nowhere in the world except on the two Gramvousa islets offshore.
05 Parthenon
Παρθενώνας
Greece · 1.6 km from Athens37.972° N 23.727° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nonbirinonko from Pixabay The Parthenon looks perfectly straight only because almost nothing about it actually is.
Did you know? The gold-and-ivory statue of Athena inside was dedicated around 438 BCE, and Pericles reportedly said it held forty talents of pure gold.
06 Sarakiniko, Milos
Σαρακήνικο Μήλου
Greece36.743° N 24.458° E
dronepicr · CC BY 2.0 On the north shore of Milos the land turns white. Sarakiniko is a stretch of coast where pale volcanic rock — tuff made largely of pumice and ash, laid down by submarine eruptions on the South Aegean Volcanic Arc — has been planed by the north wind and the sea into smooth, rounded waves of stone.
Did you know? One layer is an ancient soil that still holds fossilised plant roots up to 7 centimetres thick, traceable for about a metre.
07 Monemvasia
Μονεμβασιά
Greece36.688° N 23.056° E
Image by JustinW from Pixabay Monemvasia is a town hidden on a rock. From the mainland of the southeastern Peloponnese it looks like a huge bare island, a slab of stone about a kilometre long, up to 300 metres wide and rising to a plateau some 100 metres above the sea.
Did you know? A Sicilian fleet of King Roger II tried to take the town in 1147 and failed against the rock's natural defences.
08 Melissani Cave
Λιμνοσπήλαιο Μελισσάνης
Greece38.257° N 20.624° E
Matt Sims · CC BY 2.0 The lake inside Melissani sits under a hole that wasn't always there.
Did you know? The lake's water is brackish, a mixture of inland fresh water and seawater that has seeped in from below.
09 Mount Olympus
Όλυμπος
Greece · 24.7 km from Katerini40.083° N 22.350° E
- biosphere reserve
Image by zremus from Pixabay Mount Olympus, the home of the gods in Greek myth, is also a real and demanding mountain: a massif of some 52 peaks rising almost straight from the Aegean coast, with its summit, Mytikas, at 2,918 metres — the highest point in Greece.
Did you know? The name of the highest summit, Mytikas, means 'nose' in Greek.
10 Knossos
Κνωσός
Greece · 4.2 km from Heraklion35.298° N 25.163° E
Image by davestem from Pixabay Knossos, on Kephala hill 5 km south of the centre of Heraklion, was the greatest centre of Minoan Crete and is often described as Europe's oldest city.
Did you know? Michael Ventris announced his decipherment of Linear B on BBC radio on 1 July 1952, building heavily on the work of Alice Kober.
11 Odeon of Herodes Atticus
Ωδείο Ηρώδου του Αττικού
Greece · 1.7 km from Athens37.971° N 23.725° E
Image by 2770862 from Pixabay Built into the southwest slope of the Acropolis, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus shows Athens the Roman way: a steep semicircle of marble seats facing a stage building whose three-storey wall of arched openings still rises about 28 metres against the rock.
Did you know? The stage building and its arched facade stand about 28 metres high, three storeys of Roman masonry.
12 Temple of Hephaestus
Ναός Ηφαίστου
Greece · 1.4 km from Athens37.976° N 23.721° E
Image by MartinFuchs from Pixabay On a low rise above the ancient Agora of Athens stands the most complete Greek temple still on its feet: a Doric colonnade with its roof line intact, looking across the old marketplace towards the Acropolis.
Did you know? In the nineteenth century the building served as a burial place for non-Orthodox Europeans, including Philhellenes who died for Greek independence.
13 Spinalonga
Σπιναλόγκα
Greece · 34.5 km from Sitia35.297° N 25.738° E
Image by ERROR_420 from Pixabay A small, rocky island at the mouth of the Gulf of Elounda in eastern Crete is ringed almost entirely by Venetian walls and bastions, and its lanes still hold the houses and public buildings of a community that lived here in enforced isolation.
Did you know? In 1936 a young law student with leprosy, Epaminondas Remoundakis, founded a brotherhood that won the residents the right to marry and run businesses.
14 Samariá Gorge National Park
Φαράγγι της Σαμαριάς
Greece · 27.2 km from Chania35.271° N 23.961° E
- biosphere reserve
Image by Makalu from Pixabay The Samariá Gorge cuts through the White Mountains of western Crete in a single long descent from the Omalos plateau to the Libyan Sea. The walk begins at Xyloskalo, at about 1,230 metres, where a stair of logs once helped walkers down the first steep drop; today stone steps and a railing do the job.
Did you know? The kri-kri is probably not native to Crete at all: it was most likely brought to the island in Minoan times.
15 Ionian Islands
Επτάνησα
Greece37.800° N 20.700° E
Image by shogun from Pixabay Strung along the western coast of Greece, the Ionian Islands are the green counterpart to the bare Aegean: limestone mountains wooded with cypress, olive and fir, falling into a sea that shifts from deep blue to milky turquoise over pale pebble and marble.
Did you know? The Septinsular Republic of 1800 to 1807, under Russian and Ottoman protection, was the first Greek self-government of any kind since the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
16 Corinth Canal
Διώρυγα της Κορίνθου
Greece37.927° N 22.995° E
Image by Walkerssk from Pixabay Emperor Nero personally struck the first blow with a golden pick in 67 AD, then put 6,000 Jewish prisoners of war to work digging trenches forty to fifty metres wide from both coasts at once, plus a separate crew boring test shafts down the ridge to check the rock.
Did you know? In 40 AD Caligula had Egyptian experts study the route, and they repeated the old mistake, concluding the Corinthian Gulf sat higher than the Saronic Gulf.
17 Palamidi
Παλαμήδι
Greece · 38 km from Tripoli37.562° N 22.804° E
Image by Elizabby from Pixabay Palamidi crowns a 216-metre hill above Nafplio, and it is a textbook baroque fortress.
Did you know? When the Ottomans retook Palamidi in 1715, they got in after blowing up part of the brand-new fortifications.
18 Artemision Bronze
Ποσειδώνας του Αρτεμισίου
Greece · 0.4 km from Athens37.989° N 23.732° E
George E. Koronaios · CC0 The Artemision Bronze, known as the God from the Sea, is one of the few large Greek bronzes of the classical period to survive, and it is one of the highlights of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Did you know? No amphorae or ordinary trade cargo were recorded from the wreck, so its nature and exact date remain a puzzle.
19 Santorini
Σαντορίνη
Greece36.415° N 25.433° E
Image by Gherks from Pixabay Santorini is what remains of a volcano that blew itself apart. The islands of the group — Thera, Therasia, Aspronisi and the young, dark cones of Nea and Palea Kameni in the middle — form a broken ring around a flooded caldera, and on the main island the inner cliff falls more than 300 metres straight to the sea.
Did you know? The name Santorini comes from Saint Irene; the Arab geographer al-Idrisi recorded it as Santurin around 1153–1154.
20 Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus
Αρχαίο Θέατρο Επιδαύρου
Greece37.596° N 23.079° E
Giles Laurent · CC BY-SA 4.0 The theatre at Epidaurus is the most complete of all ancient Greek theatres, and it is famous for its acoustics: a voice from the orchestra carries clearly to the upper rows.
Did you know? The curve of the auditorium is not a simple semicircle but is drawn from three separate centres, a refinement linked to its fine sightlines and sound.
21 Vikos Gorge
Φαράγγι του Βίκου
Greece · 30.5 km from Ioannina39.929° N 20.741° E
Zografos k · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Vikos Gorge cuts through the southern flank of Mount Tymfi in the Pindus Mountains of Epirus, in northwestern Greece. It is about 32 km long, its walls drop from 120 to as much as 1,350 metres, and it narrows in places to just a few metres across.
Did you know? Perched on the very edge of the gorge near Monodendri stands the Monastery of Agia Paraskevi, built in the 15th century.
22 Voidokilia Beach
Βοϊδοκοιλιά
Greece36.964° N 21.663° E
Grzontan · CC BY-SA 3.0 Voidokilia is one of those beaches whose shape you remember before anything else. Seen from the hills above, it is an almost perfect semicircle of pale sand closing a small bay of the Ionian Sea, so regular that it is usually compared to the Greek letter omega.
Did you know? Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy, was among the first to dig in Nestor's Cave, in 1874.
23 Hilandar
Greece40.340° N 24.121° E
Image by mirkosajkov from Pixabay Behind a ring of battlemented walls and stone towers, set a little way back from the shore on the north-eastern side of the Athos peninsula, Hilandar has been the spiritual home of the Serbian Church for more than eight hundred years.
Did you know? The library holds around a thousand Slavonic manuscripts, a key archive of medieval Serbian writing.
24 Charioteer of Delphi
Ηνίοχος
Greece38.480° N 22.500° E
Václav Moravec · CC BY-SA 4.0 8 m tall, made around 470 BC and now the centrepiece of the Delphi Archaeological Museum. It belonged to a victory monument at the Sanctuary of Apollo celebrating a chariot win in the Pythian Games of 478 or 474 BC. The inscription on its limestone base names the dedicator as Polyzalus, tyrant of Gela in Sicily.
Did you know? The sculptor is unknown: Pythagoras of Rhegion and Calamis have both been proposed, though its style links it to Athenian bronzes such as the Piraeus Apollo.
25 Hozoviotissa monastery
Μονή της Παναγίας της Χοζοβιώτισσας
Greece36.835° N 25.910° E
Apenauta at Italian Wikipedia · Public domain A white wall pressed into a sheer cliff, some 300 metres above the Aegean, the monastery of Panagia Hozoviotissa looks less built than wedged into the rock of Amorgos.
Did you know? Among its treasures is a 15th-century icon of the Virgin attributed to the Cretan school of painting.
26 Daphni Monastery
Μονή Δαφνίου
Greece · 9 km from Piraeus38.013° N 23.636° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Sp!ros · CC BY-SA 4.0 Daphni Monastery stands in a pine wood in Chaidari, about 11 km north-west of central Athens, beside the old Sacred Way that ran to Eleusis.
27 Delphi
Δελφοί
Greece38.482° N 22.502° E
Helen Simonsson · CC BY-SA 3.0 Few ancient sites owe as much to their setting as Delphi. The sanctuary climbs the south-western slope of Mount Parnassus beneath the Phaedriades, a wall of sheer grey cliffs, and looks down into the gorge of the Pleistos, filled with olive trees that run on towards the sea at Itea, the harbour on the gulf below.
Did you know? According to myth, Zeus released two eagles from opposite ends of the world, and Delphi was the place where their flights crossed.
28 Chania Lighthouse
Φάρος Χανίων
Greece · 0.8 km from Chania35.519° N 24.017° E
Image by cray666 from Pixabay The lighthouse of Chania stands at the entrance to the old Venetian harbour, a stone masonry tower that closes the view along the waterfront of this Cretan port. It rises about 26 m above the bay, with a gallery and lantern at the top.
Did you know? Its red flashing light can be seen roughly seven nautical miles out to sea.
29 Nea Moni of Chios
Νέα Μονή Χίου
Greece · 7 km from Chios38.374° N 26.056° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
RomkeHoekstra · CC BY-SA 4.0 Nea Moni, the "New Monastery", sits on Provateio mountain in the interior of Chios, and it holds one of the three great sets of eleventh-century mosaics in Greece, alongside Hosios Loukas and Daphni. It was founded by the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachos and Empress Zoe.
30 Acropolis of Lindos
Ακρόπολη της Λίνδου
Greece36.092° N 28.088° E
Image by 11333328 from Pixabay The acropolis of Lindos sits on a sheer rock about 116 metres above the sea on the east coast of Rhodes, and it is one of those places where ancient, medieval and natural drama are stacked on top of each other.
Did you know? The sanctuary's fame reached across the Greek world: Alexander the Great, Ptolemy I, Pyrrhus and Philip V of Macedon all sent offerings to Athena Lindia.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Greece?
- On our list, Navagio ranks first, followed by Meteora and Oia.
- How did monks build the monasteries of Meteora?
- Hermits lived in the caves of the Meteora rocks from around the eleventh century, and the first monasteries were founded on the summits in the fourteenth. Materials and people were hauled up by ropes, nets and long ladders; steps cut into the rock were added only in the twentieth century.
- Why is the Temple of Hephaestus so well preserved?
- The temple was converted into a Christian church dedicated to Saint George and remained in use until the nineteenth century. Continuous use spared it the quarrying and destruction that befell many other ancient temples.
- How was the Santorini caldera formed?
- The caldera is the collapsed centre of a volcano that erupted catastrophically in the Late Bronze Age, around the seventeenth century BC. The sea flooded the hollow, leaving the cliff-lined ring of islands seen today.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Greece?
- In our collection, the places in Greece are most often monasteries (10), beaches (9), archaeological sites (8) and ruins (5).
- How many places are on this list in Greece?
- The list covers 58 places.