Anyone in the last few years who has seen photographs of the Acropolis, with crowds tightly packed between narrow marble colonnades, can tell that the situation has grown burdensome. Since it does not seem to be changing as we approach another high season, I have a few tips to ease your visit to the crown jewel of Athens.
The ticket situation: As with any popular sight, the Acropolis has been the target of a plethora of unofficial websites that sell so-called “priority-access” tickets to the unaware, after charging a (sometimes significant) mark-up. Of course, the less SEO-savvy governmental website stays forever buried in Google search. Here is the only official website for buying Acropolis tickets.
The reality is that the Acropolis does not offer priority entry: there’s just one type of ticket, whether you buy it online or at the physical booth, through the official website or a third-party one. Although buying your ticket online lets you skip the physical ticket booth, there’s typically a line at the entrance, and no ticket will let you jump that line.
Notes on buying the ticket online:
- Tickets are sold for specific dates and time slots—if you miss your entry, it will not be honored and getting a refund is not an option.
- Buying your ticket at least a week in advance is advisable for the busiest of days/slots. For the least busy slots (late afternoon-evening), you can usually buy a ticket at the last minute.
- If you purchase discounted tickets for young ones under 25, make sure to bring some form of ID for them – a picture of their passport on your phone suffices. Do not be surprised if the staff request it even for a visibly young teenager.
- There is a combined ticket that includes the Acropolis with other archeological sites (e.g., the legendary Ancient Agora), but there are no combined tickets that include the Acropolis and the Acropolis Museum. A website selling you this combination is doing nothing more than artificially combining the two tickets for a mark-up. This is the only official website for the Acropolis Museum tickets.
Opening hours nuance: A lot of websites (and even Google Maps) report the Acropolis opening hours as follows:
- Summer schedule (1st April to 30th October): from 08.00 am to 08.00 pm.
- Winter schedule (1st November to 31st March): 08.00 am to 05.00 pm.
While the winter schedule is correct, the summer one is more nuanced, resulting in trouble for travelers. From April 1st to August 31st, the Acropolis indeed opens at 08.00 am and closes at 08.00 pm. But starting September 1st, in order to chase the setting sun, the Acropolis also closes earlier: at 7:30 from September 1-15, at 7:00 from September 16-31, 6:30 from October 1-15, and 6:00 from October 16-31. Note that entry to most archaeological sites and museums is allowed up until 30 minutes before closing time.
The best time to visit: Acropolis crowds are usually the result of the large cruise ships that dock at the port of Athens early in the morning, pouring out thousands of people simultaneously. So as you plan your visit, the only question that matters is: “How many cruise ships will there be docked on the day of my visit?” From April to November, assume that the answer is a lot. Therefore, the best time to visit the Acropolis is in the later afternoon, as the majority of the cruise ships usually have to depart after 5:00 pm.
In fact, I would recommend visiting the Acropolis as late as its closing time affords, arriving 1 to 1.5 hours before that, allowing both sufficient time to enjoy the sight and the opportunity to descend with the sunset (for a guided tour, give yourself 2 solid hours). Do not hesitate to push your dinner to “Greek time” (i.e., after 8:30 pm) – it will be worth your while.
Of course, it’s not impossible to make a morning visit work – and in the shoulder months of the summer season, early mornings on the sacred rock can be stunning. But the only way to do so comfortably is if you enter the site around opening hour at 8:00 am, which means that you will have to be posted by the entrance at least by 7:35-40 am. This is because as the number of online ticket buyers has increased, so has the unskippable line that begins to form outside the gates very early. The earlier you arrive, the closer to the front of that line you will be. There have been days that arriving just a bit after the site’s opening at 8:15 am with a ticket in hand would still get you 45 minutes (or more) of queueing to enter.
It is not enough to enter early, you have to depart at a sensible hour, too: most of the pictures of the crowded Acropolis are of the thousands of people that get stuck at the bottleneck of the Propylaea (a narrow path leading through the ancient gateways of the Acropolis). I would say leaving before 10:00 am should get you comfortable passage through the bottleneck.
Relatedly, people ask me of the two Acropolis entrances, which one is better? The truth is they are both now hit or miss. The cruise ship buses arrive at the main one. But the lower entrance, which had become something of a common secret for individual travelers, can sometimes be worse, since the secret is out. So the most important thing is to time your arrival strategically, whichever entrance you use.
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