Athens & Cape Sounio Private Tour – 8 Hours

The Acropolis and the Parthenon, built in fifteen years in the fifth century BC after the Persians burned everything that was there before — with almost no straight lines in their design: the columns lean inward, the floor swells upward, and every correction is invisible. Around it stands the Erechtheion with its Caryatids, and below the south slope lies the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, built in the second century AD and used every summer for the Athens Festival. The Odeon has been closed since late July 2026 for a restoration expected to last about three years; it can still be seen from above, on the way up to the Acropolis. The Acropolis has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.

The Acropolis Museum stands at the foot of the rock on pillars, above an excavated Athenian neighborhood you cross on a glass floor. Its top floor is aligned with the angle of the Parthenon and glazed on all sides, so the frieze hangs where it was carved to hang, with the building itself visible through the glass.

The Temple of Olympian Zeus took nearly seven centuries to complete — begun in the sixth century BC, abandoned half-built long enough for Aristotle to use it as a lesson in vanity, and finished by Hadrian, who added a statue of himself beside the god. Fifteen columns stand; a sixteenth lies where a storm toppled it, in sections, like a stack of coins knocked over.

The Panathenaic Stadium — the Kallimarmaro, “beautiful marble” — is the only stadium in the world built entirely of marble. Begun in the fourth century BC as an earth bank, rebuilt in marble by Herodes Atticus (the same man who built the Odeon), then quarried and forgotten for sixteen centuries, and excavated again for the first modern Olympics in 1896.

At Syntagma, the Parliament was built in 1843 as the palace of King Otto, Greece’s first king. In front of it stand the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Evzones of the Presidential Guard, dressed in the pleated foustanella. The guard changes every hour on the hour; the full ceremony with the band takes place on Sundays at 11 a.m.

Around the corner, in the National Garden, stands the Zappeion — built in 1888 and named after Evangelos Zappas, the Greek who spent his fortune trying to revive the Olympic Games decades before anyone listened, and who did not live to see the first modern Games in 1896.

And along Panepistimiou, stands the Athens Trilogy: the University in the middle, the National Library on one side and the Academy of Athens on the other — three neoclassical buildings erected when Athens was a town of a few thousand people that had just been designated the national capital.

The drive out follows the Athenian Riviera: forty-odd miles of coast road south from the city, past the marinas and the beaches, to the point where Attica runs out.

The Temple of Poseidon is on the headland, and it is a temple on a cliff — that is all it is, and it is enough. Sixty metres of rock, water on three sides, and on a clear day, the islands of Kea and Kythnos appear out in the haze.

It was built between 444 and 440 BC on the ruins of an earlier temple that the Persians destroyed in 480 BC. The columns are made of local Agrileza marble, thinner than the Doric norm — the architect may have made them slender to withstand the winds on an exposed cape. Inside stood a bronze statue of Poseidon over six metres tall. Fifteen of the thirty-four columns are still standing, after two and a half thousand years of salt and earthquakes.