Visiting Athens in 2026: What Has Changed Since the 1970s?

After island hopping through Mykonos, Delos, Sifnos, and Milos we finally flew back to Athens to see the Parthenon and many of the city’s excellent museums. Although we’ve been to Athens before, our last trip was in 1979 and the changes were huge (only natural after 47 years!).

In 1979, mass tourism wasn’t really a big thing in Greece (nor anywhere really). That year, Greece welcomed only ~5.8 million tourists, which is a lot for a country that had a population of just 9.5 million at the time, but still put Greece at #14 on the most visited countries list. Today. Greece welcomes (or at least tolerates) 38 million visitors per year while the population has barely increased (to 9.8 million). Tourism accounts for 1 out of every 5 jobs and and accounts for one third of GDP; unfortunately it shows. In Athens, the number of visitors to the UNESCO World Heritage listed Acropolis is capped at 20,000 per day. Even in shoulder season it was pretty crowded. All part of the price of being the the #10 country for international visitor arrivals.

But to be fair, Athens has stepped up the experience for visitors considerably and is making sure that their mega-attractions are well preserved. The new Acropolis Museum is amazing and would indeed be a suitable home for the Parthenon Marbles (as the Greeks call the Elgin Marbles, which even the British Museum has rebranded as the “Parthenon Sculptures”). The Acropolis Museum now houses the caryatids from the Caryatid Porch of the Erechtheion; when we were last in Athens they were still in situ on the Acropolis subject to Athens’ infamous air pollution (hugely improved in 47 years!). Major work continues to preserve the star of the show, the Parthenon, too.

We spent almost all of our 3 days in Athens in museums or at the major venues of the city. Being in Athens after touring major sites such as Mycenae, Epidaurus, and Delos was actually extremely beneficial. Athens’ National Archaeological Museum houses artifacts from throughout Greece and they really make sense after having visited the sites.

We didn’t spend every waking moment in museums or at archaeological sites; we did tour through Athens neighbourhoods including Anafiotika, Monastiraki (for the flea market), and Syntagma (where we watched the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Syntagma Square). We stayed right in the busiest tourist section of Athens, the Plaka, and every evening we enjoyed one of our favourite things, Greek food! Sorry, no pictures of our delicious lamb, dolmades, nor spiced feta dishes; we’ll leave that to a younger generation that seem completely unable to eat a meal without sharing a photo of their dinner on “the ‘gram”.

We suspect (about 99% certainty) that very few others share our fascination with museums, therefore the image below are mostly just outdoor shots of the famous sites of Athens. There is one shot of a museum showpiece, but at some future date we’ll do a post for museum lovers only!

After our three full days in Athens, we jumped on a ridiculously early flight and headed for Tirana, Albania, just an hour and a half away in flying time, but a world away in terms of the visitor experience!