Nafplion Promenade

Nafplion Promenade Review

A seaside promenade skirts the Nafplion peninsula, paved with reddish flagstones and opening every so often to terraces planted with a few rosebushes and olive and cedar trees. Along the south side of the peninsula, the promenade runs midway along a cliff—it's 100 feet up to Acronafplia, 50 feet down to the sea—and leads to Arvanitia beach, a lovely place for a dip. Here and there a flight of steps goes down to the rocky shore below. (Be careful if you go swimming here, because the rocks are covered with sea urchins, which look like purple-and-black porcupines and whose quills can inflict a painful wound.)

Ayia Panagitsa. Before you reach the very tip of the peninsula, marked by a ship's beacon, there is a little shrine at the foot of a path leading up toward the Acronafplia walls above. The tiny church of the Little Virgin Mary, or Ayia Panagitsa, hugs the cliff on a small terrace and is decorated with icons. During the Turkish occupation the church hid one of Greece's secret schools. End of promenade, Nafplion, 21100.