Larisa is the largest city in Thessaly, sits in the middle of the biggest agricultural plain in Greece, and receives almost no tourism at all. It is a transit town on the Athens to Thessaloniki axis, which most travellers pass through at 130km/h. There is a reason to stop, and it was buried under the city centre until fairly recently.
The theatre under the shops
The First Ancient Theatre of Larisa was built in the 3rd century BC, seated around 10,000, and then simply disappeared. Buildings were put up on top of it and it stayed under the commercial centre until excavation began in 1910 and continued, slowly, for the best part of a century.
Uncovering it meant demolishing and compensating a large number of properties in the middle of a working city, which is why it took so long. It reopened to the public in 2016 and stages performances again. Standing in it, with modern facades directly above the top row, is a genuinely odd experience.
The river and the hill
The Pineios runs along the northern edge of the centre and the Alcazar park beside it is where the city actually spends its evenings. There is a covered bridge, a long riverside walk, and in summer the temperature difference between the water and the concrete is the whole point.
Above the centre is the Frourio hill, the ancient acropolis, carrying the Second Ancient Theatre and an Ottoman-era mosque that now works as an exhibition space. The city has grown around this one hill for something like 8,000 years without a break, which puts Larisa among the oldest continuously inhabited settlements anywhere in Europe and makes the ordinary shopping streets below it far older than they look.
The plain, and what it means
Thessaly is flat in a way no other part of Greece is. Standing on the Frourio you can see 30km in three directions with nothing to interrupt it, which for a Greek landscape is disorienting. This is the country’s grain and cotton belt, and the summer heat is continental rather than coastal: 40 degrees with no sea breeze at all.
Winter goes the other way. Larisa records some of the lowest temperatures in mainland Greece and the plain holds fog for days.
What is within an hour
- Meteora is 80km west, an hour by road, and is the reason most people are in Thessaly at all.
- Mount Olympus starts 50km north. The trailhead at Prionia is reachable in about 90 minutes.
- The Tempe valley, the gorge between Olympus and Ossa, is 25km north on the old road, which is worth taking once instead of the tunnel.
- Volos and the sea are 60km east, an hour door to door.
Where we work
Athens and Mykonos. Nothing in Larisa, nothing in Thessaly, and no arrangement anywhere in central or northern Greece. This is a guide to a city, written because the address asks about it, and it does not turn into an offer at the bottom.
For the capital, see Athens.
