Nafplio Visit
Nafplio is quite a popular place for Athenians to go for a weekend because it is less than two hours away from Athens (I wouldn’t say there are enough things to do there to justify a longer stay). As you can imagine I’ve been there several times but it’s still fun to visit. Nafplio is a town with a lot of history and used to be the capital of Greece between 1827 and 1834. The town is built between a couple of hills and the sea. Overlooking the town is the Palamidi castle that you can see in the picture. It was built in the late 1,600s to early 1,700s by the Venetians while they occupied the area. There are wonderful views from there and the picture you see of Nafplio is taken from there. You can get to the castle from the town by walking up the 900 or so steps. We planned to do it but unfortunately my daughter got sick for the couple of days we were there and she wasn’t up to it. We ended up driving which was pretty easy. There is a road on the back of Palamidi not visible in the picture. One of the reasons why this castle is well known in Greece is that one of the biggest heroes of the Greek revolution against the Turks was jailed in the castle (actually not by the Turks but by the Greeks during some infighting which is not uncommon among Greeks). You can still go inside the cell where he was jailed which we did.
The other landmark in Nafplio is Bourtzi, a small castle built around 1,470 on a tiny island sitting in front of the port. You can see it if you look carefully in the picture of Nafplio we took from the Palamidi castle. You can typically get on Bourtzi by a small boat for a few Euros. Unfortunately, they were doing repairs while we were there and people were not allowed on Bourtzi. Instead, the small boat took us around Bourtzi allowing us to take some nice pictures but also took us on a nice ride around the area making it well worth the price.
We stayed in one of the hotels in the old town. That’s the best place to stay because most places you’d want to visit are within walking distance. There are many interesting buildings in the old town and a couple of nice squares. You can see some examples of the type of older buildings you can find in the old town in the picture to the left. This picture was taken from the boat. Parking though in the old town is a bit of an issue. Most marked parking spaces are only for residents of the old town. We were lucky and didn’t have major issues because it was early in the season (middle of June) and during the week. I assume it will be a bigger issue during popular times.
One of the most fun things we did was to have frappe in one of the squares underneath a large tree of the platanos variety (“plane tree” in English). Frappe is a Greek iced coffee drink made out of Nescafe instant coffee with milk. Even though the use of instant coffee may deter you from trying it, frappe is one of the biggest Greek inventions (at par with the Greek salad) in my opinion and something you must try. I can’t count how many of frappes we had during our trip to Greece. I’ve tried to recreate it at home in the US but have never been successful so I have to drink as many as possible while in Greece Platanos is a very important tree in Greece because of the shade it produces. Having frappe on a hot day under a platanos tree is an experience worth trying. Almost every town and village in Greece has a coffee shop under a platanos tree and that’s where a lot of the people congregate during the hot afternoon.
There are a few beaches around Nafplio although none of them are considered outstanding especially compared to the beaches on the islands. We did visit one called Tolo beach which I think is one of the more popular ones and it was nice but nothing spectacular. It was only 15 minutes away from Nafplio which was great.
