Why Spring Is the Best Time to Visit Athens

Athens in July is a furnace. 35 degrees, sweat collecting in places that you’ve not even thought about for years and every square metre of the Acropolis jam-packed with a thousand other visitors all trying to get exactly the same photo. There’s legitimate reason for that and why more people have been quietly rejiggering their plans to earlier in the year.

April and May scratch an itch that summer really can’t. It’s 18–26°C most days, hotel prices are 20­–30% less than you’d expect to pay during peak period and tourist numbers are around half of what they’ll be in eight weeks time.

For British travellers booking your spring Greece holidays, the logistics stack up nicely. Heathrow is less than four hours away by direct flight. Budget carriers like Ryanair and easyJet have routes from £49 return. And the UK remains the second largest source of visitors to Athens after Germany — British visitor numbers were up 7% year-on-year by early 2024, with Greece now named in the top five destinations on Brits’ bucket list for 2026.

Philopappos Hill beats the Acropolis for views

Everyone goes to the Acropolis, and fair enough. But the best view of it? That’s from the pine-covered hill sitting right next door.

Philopappos is about twenty minutes on foot from Monastiraki. The walk up follows stone paths through pine trees that smell brilliant in warm spring air — not a difficult hike, just enough to get your legs working. At the top you get the Parthenon, the city sprawling beneath it, and the Saronic Gulf behind. Spring air is clear enough to see all of it properly. Come back in July and heat haze washes the whole thing out.

Wild poppies carpet the slopes between March and May, deep crimson against the dusty paths. Athenians have known about this for ages — you’ll see locals up here with koulouri (sesame bread rings) and takeaway coffee well before any tourists show up. The hill has become a proper alternative to Lycabettus, which gets more packed every year and involves a steeper, less enjoyable climb for what are arguably worse views.

Go about an hour before sunset. Grab a koulouri from a street vendor on the way, find somewhere quiet near the monument at the top, and just sit there. One of those travel moments that actually delivers on what you’d hoped it would be.

Agistri — a day trip nobody talks about

Most guides will send you to Aegina or Hydra. Both decent, both heaving once the weather warms up. Agistri barely gets mentioned, which is precisely why it’s worth your time.

Fifty-five minutes on the hydrofoil from Piraeus, roughly £15 return. When you step off you’re somewhere completely different. Pine forest runs down to the coastline, the water is that ridiculous turquoise you assume is only real in photos, and the whole island moves at a pace Athens forgot about decades ago. Spring is when it peaks — everything is green and lush before summer heat browns it all.

Rent an electric bike for about £10 a day and ride to Dragonera beach on the far side of the island. Pebble rather than sand, but the water more than makes up for it. Waterfront tavernas do fresh calamari and grilled octopus at prices that’d make you laugh compared to central Athens. The weekend crowd from the city doesn’t start showing up until June, so April and May you’ll have most of it to yourselves.

You’re back in Athens by evening, sunburnt and stuffed with grilled fish, and you haven’t burned a full day of your holiday getting there and back. That’s the beauty of it.

Kypseli is where Athenians actually eat

Plaka is lovely, genuinely. Cobbled streets, bougainvillea everywhere, candlelit tavernas tucked under the Acropolis walls. It’s charming. It’s also where every tourist in the city ends up having dinner, and the menus have adjusted accordingly. Prices are higher, the food plays it safe, and the experience is built for visitors more than locals.

Kypseli runs on different energy. Head to Fokionos Negri — a long pedestrianised street lined with plane trees, about fifteen minutes north of centre on the metro from Syntagma. Not exactly undiscovered anymore, but still firmly local territory rather than tourist ground.

The Kypseli Municipal Market anchors the whole area. Used to be a standard food market, now it’s part social enterprise hub, part creative space — eco-conscious pop-ups alongside vintage vinyl stalls alongside traditional vendors who’ve traded there for years. Somehow it works without feeling forced, which is more than most “revitalised” markets manage.

April is when the plane trees along Fokionos Negri are in full blossom. Order a freddo espresso — iced, whipped, aggressively caffeinated, basically the Athenian national drink — and sit underneath them for a while. That’s modern Athens right there, and you won’t find it in Plaka.

How to actually enjoy the Acropolis

Athens pulled in close to 8 million foreign visitors in 2024. A fat chunk of those were standing in the Acropolis queue at 11am, slowly baking. Don’t be one of them.

Book the 8am entry slot, about £20 for a standard ticket. Turn up on time — not “roughly eightish,” not ten minutes late — because the gap between the first wave and the second is massive. At eight in the morning in April, the light is soft and warm, the marble has this golden tone to it, and you can actually stand in front of the columns and take the whole thing in without dodging someone’s selfie stick every thirty seconds.

On your way up, route through Anafiotika. It’s a cluster of whitewashed houses jammed under the north slope, built in the 1800s by workers from the Cycladic islands who basically recreated their village in the middle of Athens. Narrow alleys, cats asleep on doorsteps, bougainvillea spilling over walls. Looks like a pocket of Santorini dropped into the city. No souvenir shops. No overpriced cocktail bars. Just houses and cats and quiet.

By half ten the sun’s warm enough that you’re grateful you started early. The coach groups have turned up. Leave, find a coffee in Plaka, and feel privately pleased about your morning.

Orthodox Easter is something else entirely

Your dates flexible? Aim for Greek Orthodox Easter, April 20 in 2026. It is, though, almost unrecognizable as a British Easter weekend of chocolate eggs and a bank holiday lie-in.

Holy Week comes on slowly — processions through the streets, church services with eerie Byzantine chanting, a noticeable change in the atmosphere of the city. Then Good Saturday night the whole thing blows up. Fireworks, thousands of candles and midnight services spilling out of churches and the tradition of cracking red-dyed eggs against each other.

On Easter Sunday there is lamb on the spit, consumed al fresco with extended family. Restaurants are either closed completely or packed with celebrating Greeks, so book well in advance – or make friends with a local. It’s hard to explain the atmosphere if you’ve never been — properly joyous in a way that does not come along too often.

Practical note: Some museums change their hours during Holy Week, and a few shut on certain days, so look them up before you plan your route. Late April post-Easter is arguably an ideal window — the holidays are over, temps are warm but not roasting, and the summer crush is still weeks away.

The practical stuff

Late April to mid-May is the window to aim for. Weather’s settled, Easter closures are behind you, and the summer wave hasn’t started. Most days sit around 22–26°C and evenings are warm enough to eat outside comfortably without a jacket.

On the money side — spring Athens is genuinely affordable for a European city break. Between cheaper flights, lower hotel rates, and the fact that eating and drinking out here still costs noticeably less than London, a long weekend won’t wreck your finances the way Paris or Rome can.