We travelled to Athens in July 2022. It was the last stop on our month-long honeymoon. It was hot and busy, as it was summer and peak tourist season. We recommend trying to go any time other than July or August. We felt like we fit in enough during our 2 days, but there is obviously much more to see in such a large city. There are also some really cool day trips you can take from Athens if you’re there longer.
We stayed in Plaka, which we chose due to its proximity to restaurants and the Acropolis site. We found this area easy to get around from and walk to the sites we wanted to see. Our AirBNB was super walkable – we could walk everywhere on our list. You’ll only need the metro to get to and from the airport if you stay in Plaka.
Our do not miss places are the Acropolis ruins, Acropolis Museum, and the Panathenaic Stadium. If you’re in Athens on a Sunday, you can catch the special changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Syntagma Square at 11:00am. You’ll want to plan well if you’ll be visiting on a Sunday – lots of places are closed.
We included a map at the end to help visualize your itinerary. If you want to check out where we ate , take a look at our Gluten Free Guide.
Here’s what we did during our 2 days (3 nights) in Athens:
Arrival Day: Arrival and exploring.
Day 1: Panathenaic Stadium, Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and exploring Plaka markets.
Day 2: Acropolis archaeological site and Acropolis Museum.
Departure Day: Departure.
DETAILS
Arrival Day:
Arrival day! We arrived at the airport (Eleftherios Venizelos) and took the train into the city before changing to the metro line that would take us to our AirBNB. There are many warnings about both this train and the metro, so be aware of your surroundings. We didn’t have any issues, but we could pick out people who were looking for targets and we noticed locals even holding their bags strategically.
Use any time left in your day to explore the neighbourhood you’re staying in! For us, this was finding a grocery store (Sklavenitis) to get breakfast food.
DAY 1:
We wanted to have time to wander and explore, so that’s what we set out to do today. However, we had a few places we wanted to make sure we saw. Our first stop was the Panathenaic Stadium, which is the site of the first modern Olympic games. You can get tickets to go into the stadium and tour around it, but we didn’t do that. On our way here, we walked past Hadrian’s arch and the national gardens, which were nice to walk through and enjoy some reprieve from the heat. You may want to add these two places to your “to visit” list if you don’t want to wander and explore aimlessly.
After the stadium, we made our way to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Syntagma Square. This was about a 1km walk and takes about 15 minutes. We were surprised to stumble upon a changing of the guard, which we stopped and watched before making our way through the shopping district of Ermou. This led us to Plaka where there are many streets and alleys lined with small shops, markets, and places to buy souvenirs. We got dinner in Plaka near the Acropolis Museum at a restaurant called Greek Stories, which has an entirely gluten free menu and we ate at each of our 3 nights.
DAY 2:
Start your day early at the entrance to the Acropolis archaeological site. It’s open from 8:00am to 8:00pm during peak season, so if you’d like to beat the crowds and lines, you’ll want to be at the entrance at 7:45am. We did book tickets for the Acropolis in advance with skip-the-line privileges, but you can easily buy tickets on site. How long you’ll wait in line really is dictated by what time you show up.
The best advice we read was to head straight to the Parthenon at the top and then work your way down. This was good advice. The longer we were at the top, the busier it got. Tours started arriving at 9:00 and it got unbearably crowded. The climb up, time at the top, and walk back down took us about 1.5 hours.
After finishing at the Acropolis, we made our way to Syntagma Square to catch the special 11:00am Sunday changing of the guard at Hellenic Parliament. This is where all of Athens was on a Sunday morning. It was busy. There were tons of police officers working on crowd control. It was neat to see the special change, but you could tell shorter people were frustrated with how little they could see if they were not well positioned.
We got lunch and then walked our way through Monastiraki neighbourhood (really beautiful graffiti art in this neighbourhood!), before heading back to the Acropolis Museum to enjoy some air conditioning in the heat of the afternoon. It would have been more convenient to do the museum right after the Acropolis itself, but we really wanted to catch the special changing of the guard. We had pre-booked tickets that were combined with our archaeological site tickets, but there was no lineup when we arrived. We probably could have spent more time at the museum, but we had seen so many Greek museums at this point in our trip that we did it quickly (about 2 hours).
Departure Day:
This will be the day you depart, or if you’ve chosen to extend your stay in Athens, perhaps you’re taking a day trip to Hydra, visiting the Temple of Poseiden at Sounion, or checking out more of Athens. If you’re leaving Athens, we hope you enjoyed your stay.
We hope you enjoyed our “2 Days in Athens” itinerary!
HOW TO USE THE MAP: Click on the Wanderlog logo in the bottom right corner to open the full-size map up in a new tab. There, you can choose to just look at one day at a time or see all of the days on the map at once (click the 3 squares in the top right to choose). You can also export the map to Google Maps, share the map with others, or save the map.
A little helpful tip: Matt Barrett’s page is an excellent resource to help you plan your trip to Greece!