Patra is Greece’s third city and its western door. Everything about the place follows from that: the ferries to Italy leave from here, the motorway from Athens ends here, and the enormous bridge at Rio carries the whole of the western mainland across the gulf. It is a working port that throws the best party in the country once a year.
The carnival
The Patras Carnival is the largest in Greece and among the larger ones in Europe, running from mid-January through to Clean Monday. It is not a single parade. It is six weeks of events ending in a weekend that takes over the entire city.
Two things distinguish it. The first is the treasure hunt game, an organised city-wide competition between groups that has run since the 1960s and is taken extremely seriously by people who are otherwise sensible. The second is the burning of the carnival king at the harbour on the Sunday night, in front of a crowd in six figures.
Accommodation for that weekend is booked months in advance and prices double. If you want to see it, decide in November.
The bridge
The Rio-Antirrio bridge opened in 2004 and is 2,880 metres of cable-stayed span across the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf. The engineering problem it solved is worth knowing: the seabed here is deep, soft and in an active seismic zone with the two sides slowly moving apart. The piers therefore do not sit in the seabed at all. They rest on gravel beds laid on top of it, so the whole structure can move.
The ferry still runs alongside it and is cheaper. Locals use both depending on the queue.
The upper town
Most visitors see only the grid by the port, which is 19th century, arcaded and pleasant enough. The older part is up the hill: the Ano Poli, reached by a monumental staircase from Agiou Nikolaou, with the Byzantine castle at the top built on the ancient acropolis and largely from its stones.
The Roman odeon below it predates the one in Athens by roughly a century and is still used for performances in summer.
Practical
- Athens to Patra is 2 hours 15 by road on the A8, which was rebuilt as full motorway and is fast.
- Ferries run to Ancona, Bari, Brindisi and Venice. Ancona is around 20 hours.
- The city is a university town, which is why the nightlife around Riga Feraiou and Agiou Nikolaou is younger and cheaper than the size of the city would suggest.
- Saint Andrew’s basilica by the port is the largest Orthodox church in Greece by floor area.
Where we work
Athens and Mykonos only. Nothing is arranged in Patra or anywhere in the Peloponnese, and nobody represents us there. This page describes the city because the URL asks about it, and stops at describing it. For Attica, see Athens.
