Family's flying in, everyone wants the Acropolis, and the kids want to run. These are the sights we take guests to with our own kids along: ancient sites with room to roam, museums with family kits and working models, hilltops for the sunset view and a cave-fed lake for a swim. Here's what we checked, from the Parthenon to an open-air cinema under the floodlit Acropolis.
A flat-topped rock 150 m above sea level, crowned by temples built in the fifth century BC: the Parthenon, the Propylaea gateway, the Erechtheion and the small Temple of Athena Nike. Kids can spot the Erechtheion porch held up by stone women (the caryatids), and the ancient Theatre of Dionysus sits on the south slope.
Suits school-age kids who know a few Greek myths more than toddlers.
The Acropolis Museum holds the sculptures and objects found on the Acropolis rock and its slopes. Glass floors look down onto the excavated remains of an ancient neighborhood, which you can also walk through from the courtyard.
Inside are the original Caryatids from the Erechtheion and Archaic statues with traces of their paint. The top-floor Parthenon Gallery spaces its columns like the temple's, with glass walls facing the Acropolis.
The Ancient Agora was the marketplace and meeting ground of ancient Athens, on the slope below the Acropolis. Paths lead past the Temple of Hephaestus, the Byzantine Church of the Holy Apostles and the remains of law courts and shops, under oak and laurel trees planted since 1954.
The rebuilt Stoa of Attalos holds the site museum, where exhibits show how Athenian democracy worked.
The Panathenaic Stadium, known locally as Kallimarmaro (beautiful marble), is the only stadium in the world built entirely of marble. It hosted the first modern Olympics in 1896 and is still the finish line of the Athens Marathon.
Kids can run onto the track, climb the marble stands, pose on the podium, walk the vaulted passage, and see Olympic torches and posters from 1896 to today in the museum.
The National Garden is a 19th-century English-style park behind the Parliament, with winding paths, small bridges and about 6,600 trees. Kids head for the duck pond and goldfish pond, then the playground and the Children's Library. A small Botanical Museum, a sundial and Roman ruins add a little history.
Bikes and scooters can't be ridden inside, which keeps the paths calm for toddlers on foot.
Philopappos Hill, the ancient Hill of the Muses, rises southwest of the Acropolis under pines, olives and cypresses. Stone paths and resting terraces laid by architect Dimitris Pikionis in the 1950s climb to the Philopappos Monument, the 2nd-century mausoleum of a Roman consul.
On the way, kids can look into the rock-cut caves known as the "Prison of Socrates" and stop at the small church of Agios Dimitrios Loumbardiaris.
Lycabettus is a limestone hill rising 277 meters over central Athens, the highest point in the city center, with pine trees around its base. A funicular runs up inside a 210-meter tunnel from Kolonaki in about 3 minutes, or families can climb the trail. At the top sit the Chapel of St. George, a café-restaurant, an open-air theater and views across the city to the Acropolis.
Greece's largest archaeology museum holds more than 20,000 objects, spanning Greek history from prehistory to late antiquity. Kids tend to make for the Mycenaean gold, including the mask once wrongly named for Agamemnon, the Artemision Bronze, Egyptian mummies, Bronze Age wall paintings from Akrotiri on Santorini, and the Antikythera mechanism.
Out front, a garden lined with sculptures has a café.
The museum holds Cycladic figurines, ancient Greek and Cypriot art, and a gallery on daily life in antiquity, spread over two buildings joined by a corridor.
Families can rent the Family Kit at the entrance: a box of maps, exhibit copies, story cards and an augmented reality app that puts kids in photos with the largest figurine. Weekend workshops run by age group, from toddlers with a parent to 12-year-olds.
More than 100 working reconstructions of ancient Greek inventions fill this museum, from Philo's robot maid and early automata to the Antikythera Mechanism, early cinema devices and telecommunication systems. Each model is built from ancient texts and archaeological evidence.
A separate exhibition holds 45 reconstructed ancient instruments and toys, with live demonstrations of how they were played. It suits school-age kids who like gadgets and how things work.
A science and technology museum in a restored neoclassical house in Thissio. The permanent EUREKA exhibition shows working models of ancient Greek inventions: a mechanical maidservant that pours wine into a guest's cup, Heron's temple doors that open when a fire is lit on the altar, and a large see-through model of the Antikythera Mechanism, a 2,000-year-old analog computer that predicted eclipses. Best for curious school-age kids.
An interactive museum of optical illusions where visitors step into the exhibits and pose for photos that trick the eye. Kids cross the spinning Vortex Tunnel, test their balance in the Tilted Room, walk through the upside-down Reversed Room, and grow or shrink in the big and small room. Mirror rooms, hands-on installations and puzzle images fill the rest of the route.
Little Kook is a themed cafe whose decor goes over the top, from the props hanging off the ceiling to the tables set out in the lane. Kids come for the look of the place as much as the food, and every corner has something to spot. It sits in Psyrri, the old lanes just north of Monastiraki.
Stavros Niarchos Park is the 21-hectare green space around the Renzo Piano-designed cultural center that houses the Greek National Opera and the National Library. Kids can run the Great Lawn, try the Sound Garden, find their way through the Labyrinth and play at the playgrounds.
Fountains in the seawater canal dance to music through the day. It is the world's largest public Mediterranean garden.
The Eugenides Foundation's digital planetarium seats 278 under a 24.5-meter hemispherical dome, with full-dome shows on astronomy and other sciences.
Family titles include The Stellars, where three stranded aliens ask the audience to help save their rainforest, and The Enchanted Reef, about two fish on a mission to save a reef. The same building holds the Science and Technology Center, with interactive exhibits on physics, chemistry and robotics.
Georgios Averof is an armored cruiser launched in Italy in 1910, and the only ship of its type still in existence. It led the Greek fleet in the First Balkan War and served through World War II.
Kids walk the open decks past the big gun turrets, then take steep stairways down below. The trireme Olympias, a reconstructed ancient Greek warship, docks nearby as part of the same museum.
Part of the Benaki Museum, the Toy Museum is housed in the seaside Kouloura Mansion. It is built on Maria Argyriadi's collection of 20,000 vintage toys, games, children's books and clothes, one of the largest in Europe. Kids get to see what children played with and wore generations ago, and compare it with their own toy box.
The Experience Park is the first open part of the Ellinikon redevelopment, on the site of the city's old airport. Its 75 acres hold about 900 trees, 80,000 plants and three plazas.
Kids head for the Forest Playground, built from wooden climbing structures, and the Water Maze, a walk-in fountain of water jets and light. There is also a zen garden and outdoor fitness equipment.
Lake Vouliagmeni is a small brackish lake under a sheer rock cliff, formed when a cave roof collapsed about 2,000 years ago. Warm seawater seeps in through flooded caves and mixes with a spring, so the water stays between 21°C and 29°C.
Kids swim straight off the main deck, where sunbeds and tables go first come, first served. Lifeguards are on duty, and there is no natural shade.
The Temple of Poseidon stands on the headland at Cape Sounion, almost 60 meters above the sea, which surrounds it on three sides. Built around 444 to 440 BC, it still has 15 of its original 34 Doric marble columns standing.
Kids can hunt for the name of Lord Byron carved into the base of one column, then find the ruins of the Temple of Athena close by.
The only zoo in Greece, home to more than 1,500 animals of about 220 species across 81 hectares. The African Savannah has giraffes, zebras, white rhinos and cheetahs, with a giraffe feeding station.
Elsewhere are Asian elephants, chimpanzees, lions, tigers, and wolves and brown bears in the Greek Forest, plus three walk-through aviaries, a lemur forest and a farm where kids can pet goats and ponies.
Cine Thisio is an open-air cinema on Apostolou Pavlou street, with rows of seats facing a big screen and the floodlit Acropolis in view above it. Families come for an evening film under the sky, where the setting is half the show. It suits kids old enough to sit through a late film outdoors.
Family's flying in, everyone wants the Acropolis, and the kids want to run. These are the sights we take guests to with our own kids along: ancient sites with room to roam, museums with family kits and working models, hilltops for the sunset view and a cave-fed lake for a swim. Here's what we checked, from the Parthenon to an open-air cinema under the floodlit Acropolis.
A flat-topped rock 150 m above sea level, crowned by temples built in the fifth century BC: the Parthenon, the Propylaea gateway, the Erechtheion and the small Temple of Athena Nike. Kids can spot the Erechtheion porch held up by stone women (the caryatids), and the ancient Theatre of Dionysus sits on the south slope.
Suits school-age kids who know a few Greek myths more than toddlers.
The Acropolis Museum holds the sculptures and objects found on the Acropolis rock and its slopes. Glass floors look down onto the excavated remains of an ancient neighborhood, which you can also walk through from the courtyard.
Inside are the original Caryatids from the Erechtheion and Archaic statues with traces of their paint. The top-floor Parthenon Gallery spaces its columns like the temple's, with glass walls facing the Acropolis.
The Ancient Agora was the marketplace and meeting ground of ancient Athens, on the slope below the Acropolis. Paths lead past the Temple of Hephaestus, the Byzantine Church of the Holy Apostles and the remains of law courts and shops, under oak and laurel trees planted since 1954.
The rebuilt Stoa of Attalos holds the site museum, where exhibits show how Athenian democracy worked.
The Panathenaic Stadium, known locally as Kallimarmaro (beautiful marble), is the only stadium in the world built entirely of marble. It hosted the first modern Olympics in 1896 and is still the finish line of the Athens Marathon.
Kids can run onto the track, climb the marble stands, pose on the podium, walk the vaulted passage, and see Olympic torches and posters from 1896 to today in the museum.
The National Garden is a 19th-century English-style park behind the Parliament, with winding paths, small bridges and about 6,600 trees. Kids head for the duck pond and goldfish pond, then the playground and the Children's Library. A small Botanical Museum, a sundial and Roman ruins add a little history.
Bikes and scooters can't be ridden inside, which keeps the paths calm for toddlers on foot.
Philopappos Hill, the ancient Hill of the Muses, rises southwest of the Acropolis under pines, olives and cypresses. Stone paths and resting terraces laid by architect Dimitris Pikionis in the 1950s climb to the Philopappos Monument, the 2nd-century mausoleum of a Roman consul.
On the way, kids can look into the rock-cut caves known as the "Prison of Socrates" and stop at the small church of Agios Dimitrios Loumbardiaris.
Lycabettus is a limestone hill rising 277 meters over central Athens, the highest point in the city center, with pine trees around its base. A funicular runs up inside a 210-meter tunnel from Kolonaki in about 3 minutes, or families can climb the trail. At the top sit the Chapel of St. George, a café-restaurant, an open-air theater and views across the city to the Acropolis.
Greece's largest archaeology museum holds more than 20,000 objects, spanning Greek history from prehistory to late antiquity. Kids tend to make for the Mycenaean gold, including the mask once wrongly named for Agamemnon, the Artemision Bronze, Egyptian mummies, Bronze Age wall paintings from Akrotiri on Santorini, and the Antikythera mechanism.
Out front, a garden lined with sculptures has a café.
The museum holds Cycladic figurines, ancient Greek and Cypriot art, and a gallery on daily life in antiquity, spread over two buildings joined by a corridor.
Families can rent the Family Kit at the entrance: a box of maps, exhibit copies, story cards and an augmented reality app that puts kids in photos with the largest figurine. Weekend workshops run by age group, from toddlers with a parent to 12-year-olds.
More than 100 working reconstructions of ancient Greek inventions fill this museum, from Philo's robot maid and early automata to the Antikythera Mechanism, early cinema devices and telecommunication systems. Each model is built from ancient texts and archaeological evidence.
A separate exhibition holds 45 reconstructed ancient instruments and toys, with live demonstrations of how they were played. It suits school-age kids who like gadgets and how things work.
A science and technology museum in a restored neoclassical house in Thissio. The permanent EUREKA exhibition shows working models of ancient Greek inventions: a mechanical maidservant that pours wine into a guest's cup, Heron's temple doors that open when a fire is lit on the altar, and a large see-through model of the Antikythera Mechanism, a 2,000-year-old analog computer that predicted eclipses. Best for curious school-age kids.
An interactive museum of optical illusions where visitors step into the exhibits and pose for photos that trick the eye. Kids cross the spinning Vortex Tunnel, test their balance in the Tilted Room, walk through the upside-down Reversed Room, and grow or shrink in the big and small room. Mirror rooms, hands-on installations and puzzle images fill the rest of the route.
Little Kook is a themed cafe whose decor goes over the top, from the props hanging off the ceiling to the tables set out in the lane. Kids come for the look of the place as much as the food, and every corner has something to spot. It sits in Psyrri, the old lanes just north of Monastiraki.
Stavros Niarchos Park is the 21-hectare green space around the Renzo Piano-designed cultural center that houses the Greek National Opera and the National Library. Kids can run the Great Lawn, try the Sound Garden, find their way through the Labyrinth and play at the playgrounds.
Fountains in the seawater canal dance to music through the day. It is the world's largest public Mediterranean garden.
The Eugenides Foundation's digital planetarium seats 278 under a 24.5-meter hemispherical dome, with full-dome shows on astronomy and other sciences.
Family titles include The Stellars, where three stranded aliens ask the audience to help save their rainforest, and The Enchanted Reef, about two fish on a mission to save a reef. The same building holds the Science and Technology Center, with interactive exhibits on physics, chemistry and robotics.
Georgios Averof is an armored cruiser launched in Italy in 1910, and the only ship of its type still in existence. It led the Greek fleet in the First Balkan War and served through World War II.
Kids walk the open decks past the big gun turrets, then take steep stairways down below. The trireme Olympias, a reconstructed ancient Greek warship, docks nearby as part of the same museum.
Part of the Benaki Museum, the Toy Museum is housed in the seaside Kouloura Mansion. It is built on Maria Argyriadi's collection of 20,000 vintage toys, games, children's books and clothes, one of the largest in Europe. Kids get to see what children played with and wore generations ago, and compare it with their own toy box.
The Experience Park is the first open part of the Ellinikon redevelopment, on the site of the city's old airport. Its 75 acres hold about 900 trees, 80,000 plants and three plazas.
Kids head for the Forest Playground, built from wooden climbing structures, and the Water Maze, a walk-in fountain of water jets and light. There is also a zen garden and outdoor fitness equipment.
Lake Vouliagmeni is a small brackish lake under a sheer rock cliff, formed when a cave roof collapsed about 2,000 years ago. Warm seawater seeps in through flooded caves and mixes with a spring, so the water stays between 21°C and 29°C.
Kids swim straight off the main deck, where sunbeds and tables go first come, first served. Lifeguards are on duty, and there is no natural shade.
The Temple of Poseidon stands on the headland at Cape Sounion, almost 60 meters above the sea, which surrounds it on three sides. Built around 444 to 440 BC, it still has 15 of its original 34 Doric marble columns standing.
Kids can hunt for the name of Lord Byron carved into the base of one column, then find the ruins of the Temple of Athena close by.
The only zoo in Greece, home to more than 1,500 animals of about 220 species across 81 hectares. The African Savannah has giraffes, zebras, white rhinos and cheetahs, with a giraffe feeding station.
Elsewhere are Asian elephants, chimpanzees, lions, tigers, and wolves and brown bears in the Greek Forest, plus three walk-through aviaries, a lemur forest and a farm where kids can pet goats and ponies.
Cine Thisio is an open-air cinema on Apostolou Pavlou street, with rows of seats facing a big screen and the floodlit Acropolis in view above it. Families come for an evening film under the sky, where the setting is half the show. It suits kids old enough to sit through a late film outdoors.
