2-Day Private Tour in Delphi, Nafpactus & Ancient Olympia from Athens

Delphi and Ancient Olympia are ancient Greece's greatest sanctuaries, but doing them as separate day trips from Athens means exhausting, endless driving. Our private 2 day Delphi and Olympia tour skips the rushed commute and gives you both sites at your own pace, with an olive oil tasting and farm lunch below Delphi, a family honey farm near Ancient Olympia, and an overnight stay by the Venetian harbor of Nafpaktos. Your own licensed guide and driver, and no group to wait for.

Day 1 - Athens - Delphi - Olive Oil Tasting and Farm Lunch - Nafpaktos

• Your private Delphi tour from Athens begins when you meet your driver at your hotel and drive northwest toward Mount Parnassus. The road climbs steadily for about two and a half hours, and the last stretch above Livadia opens onto the plain of Boeotia before turning up into the mountains.
• At Delphi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the place the ancient Greeks called the navel of the world, your licensed guide takes you up the Sacred Way past the treasuries of the rival Greek cities to the Temple of Apollo, where the oracle spoke, and on to the theatre and the stadium at the top of the sanctuary. The climb is steady and the stone is uneven, so closed shoes matter here. You then visit the Delphi Archaeological Museum, which holds the bronze Charioteer and the twin kouroi of Argos, so the finds and the site make sense together rather than as two separate visits.
• Because we arrive without a coach group and without a fixed departure time, you can take Delphi at your own pace. Most visitors spend an hour and leave. There is a bench above the stadium where you can see the whole sanctuary below and the olive groves running down to the gulf, and almost nobody climbs that far.
• Olive oil tasting and lunch at a local farm. We then drive down through the olive groves of Amfissa, one of the oldest continuously cultivated olive landscapes in Greece, where the trees run unbroken from the mountain to the sea. At a family run farm you taste the year's oil straight from the producer, with the difference between early and late harvest explained by the person who pressed it, then sit down to lunch made from what the farm grows. This is the part of the day guests write to us about afterwards, more often than the temple.
• From there it is a short drive along the gulf to Nafpaktos, whose Venetian harbor is one of the smallest and best preserved in Greece, with the castle walls running down the hillside to enclose it. There is time for a walk through the old town before dinner. Overnight in Nafpaktos.

Day 2 - Ancient Olympia - Honey and Food Tasting - Corinth Canal - Athens

• After breakfast we cross the Rio-Antirrio bridge, the longest multi-span cable-stayed bridge in the world, built to withstand both earthquakes and the slow separation of the two shores it connects. On the far side we drive south through the Peloponnese toward Ancient Olympia.
• Your private Ancient Olympia tour takes you into the sanctuary where the Games were held every four years from 776 BC until 393 AD. Your guide walks you through the Temple of Zeus, the workshop of Pheidias, and the vaulted tunnel into the stadium, where you can still line up on the original starting blocks. The Archaeological Museum of Olympia next door holds the pediment sculptures from the temple and the Hermes of Praxiteles.
• Honey tasting at Local Farm: At a local producers' market you taste olive oil and wine from the surrounding groves and vineyards, with the different varieties and pressings explained as you go. We then stop at a family honey farm in the hills, where under the shade of the trees you are served coffee or juice with hand made desserts, all using honey the family has produced here for generations. Greek honey comes mostly from pine and thyme rather than flowers, which is why it tastes nothing like what most visitors know at home.
• Before returning to Athens we stop at the Corinth Canal, six kilometers long and cut eighty meters deep through solid rock. Nero began the work in 67 AD with a golden pickaxe and six thousand slaves; it was finished eighteen centuries later.