Volos has one custom worth travelling for, and it is not a monument. It is the tsipouradiko: you order a small bottle of tsipouro, and food arrives that you did not choose. Order a second, and different food arrives. Nobody hands you a menu. The city has built an entire eating culture on this and it works better than any restaurant system in Greece.
How a tsipouradiko actually works
The rhythm is fixed. One small bottle, one plate of mezedes, decided by the kitchen. Common openers are grilled octopus, small fried fish, or a spicy sausage. The second round is usually better than the first because the kitchen has decided you are staying.
Two rules people get wrong. Do not ask what is coming, because that removes the entire point of the exercise. And do not order four bottles at once; the sequence is the meal, and a table that arrives all at once is just lunch.
The concentration is around the port on Argonafton and in the streets behind it. Lunchtime is the traditional hour, not evening.
Pelion, above the city
The mountain rises straight out of Volos and the villages on it were built high and hidden, which was deliberate: they sat above the malarial coastal marshes, out of sight of the sea and out of easy reach of anyone arriving from it, which mattered a great deal in the centuries when arriving from the sea usually meant raiders. Makrinitsa hangs on the slope with a view over the whole Pagasetic Gulf and is the one everybody visits. Portaria is next to it and slightly quieter. Vizitsa and Milies are worth the extra half hour.
The architecture is specific and unlike anywhere else in Greece: stone houses with slate roofs, small windows, and painted interiors. This is a wet, wooded mountain with chestnut and beech forest, and it snows properly in winter.
The little train
The Pelion railway is a 600mm narrow gauge line built in the 1890s, engineered in part by Evaristo de Chirico, whose son Giorgio became the painter. It runs from Ano Lechonia to Milies at weekends, takes about 90 minutes for 15km, and crosses a stone bridge that de Chirico built without mortar.
It is slow and it is meant to be. Sit on the right going up.
Two seas
This is the geographical oddity of the peninsula. The western side faces the sheltered Pagasetic Gulf, with calm water and small pebble bays. The eastern side faces the open Aegean, and the beaches there, Mylopotamos with its pierced rock, Fakistra at the bottom of a long descent and Papa Nero below Agios Ioannis, are the dramatic ones, exposed to the swell and often several degrees colder than the water on the other side of the same mountain. They are 30 minutes apart by road and feel like different countries.
Practical
- Volos to Athens is about 4 hours by road or train.
- The ferries to Skiathos, Skopelos and Alonissos leave from the city port, 90 minutes to the first.
- The mountain roads are narrow, steep and slow. Allow far more time than the distance implies.
- Winter here is real. Pelion has a ski centre at Agriolefkes.
Where we work
Athens and Mykonos, and nowhere else in Greece. There is nothing arranged in Volos, in Thessaly or on Pelion, and no one operates under our name there. This page is a destination guide. For the capital, see Athens.
