For a small town, Nafplio has a remarkable range of museums, from the great Archaeological Museum on Syntagma Square to the award-winning folklore collection, the unique worry-bead museum and the war museum in the old military school. Between them they cover the prehistoric and Mycenaean Argolid, the traditional life and costume of the Peloponnese, the … Read more
Syntagma Square is the grand marble-paved heart of Nafplio’s old town, the finest square in the Peloponnese and the natural first stop for almost every visitor. Ringed by the buildings of Greece’s first capital, from the Venetian barracks that hold the Archaeological Museum to the old Ottoman mosque known as the Trianon and, close by, … Read more
The old town of Nafplio is the most beautiful historic quarter in Greece, a maze of marble-paved streets, Venetian and neoclassical houses, and squares gathered beneath the fortresses on a headland by the sea. As the first capital of the modern Greek state, it holds the buildings where the young nation took shape, from the … Read more
Acronafplia is the oldest of Nafplio’s three castles, a long fortified ridge rising directly above the old town between Palamidi and the sea. Occupied since the Bronze Age and rebuilt by Greeks, Franks, Venetians and Ottomans, its walls carry the marks of every people who held the town. Lower and older than the great fortress … Read more
Nafplio is the most beautiful town in the Peloponnese and the first capital of modern Greece, a place of three fortresses, marble streets and a harbour crowned by an island castle. It packs an extraordinary amount into a small space: the great Venetian fortress of Palamidi on the hill, the island fort of Bourtzi in … Read more
Bourtzi is the little castle that sits alone on a rock in the middle of Nafplio’s harbour, the image that appears on every postcard of the town. Built by the Venetians in the fifteenth century on the tiny islet of Agioi Theodoroi, it guarded the entrance to the port with a great chain strung across … Read more
Palamidi is the great fortress that crowns Nafplio, one of the finest Venetian strongholds anywhere in Greece. Built in just three years in the early eighteenth century on a rock some 200 metres above the town, it is not a single castle but a chain of eight self-contained bastions linked across the hilltop, reached by … Read more