The views at this temple will truly take your breath away! Gorgeous spot to watch a sunset. Wear sneakers.
The views at this temple will truly take your breath away! Gorgeous spot to watch a sunset. Wear sneakers.
Worth the travel. The ruins and the view are both impressive and the walking up there is short and easy.
Sounio is famous for sun set. If you go to islands, you can see beautiful sun set there and you don't need to go to Sounio. Actually, I watched more beautiful sun set from Santorini Island.
It took 1.5 hour by bus from central Athens. I went to there in April and sun set was past 20:00.
But the last bus for return was 20:00 and I had to leave Sounio before sun set. In summer season, sun set should be later. I am not sure the bus company provides later bus in summer season.
In Sounio, there is only a temple and a small restaurant.That's it!
Loved the Temple of Poseidon. Very large and in pretty good shape considering. Lord Byron signed the temple...try to find his engraving!!!
Our taxi driver from the airport mentioned going here, as did the hotel concierge. We took an organized 4 hour bus tour (go tours) to get here. The drive there,and narration were nice. Once there we were Amazed at the beauty. W could see the columns from our approach a few miles away, which made it spectacular form a distance. Once there is was more amazing up close. This place, and the history around it, is really cool. W only had an hour to walk around, take pictures, have a coffee with a shot of ouzo, then back on the bus to return. If you have the ability to drive, I would as there were places along the way where I would stop, but we had no choice but to take a bus tour, the that was still nice. The views along the way were incredible. If you have half a day to fill while in Athens, or Greece, go here.
At school, I read Colin Simpson's book 'The Unclouded Eye', which contained a sunset photo of the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in Greece. It looked a magical spot to me and I made a mental note to go there some time. It took me many years, but I'm happy to say my partner Kathie and I made it there eventually, and were glad we did.
We booked a tour with Chat in Athens, and had no trouble getting aboard a big air-conditioned tour bus for their half-day afternoon trip to Cape Sounion. The tour cost $A60 per person. They had an English-speaking guide aboard, but she was a bit of a duffer, compared to the one we had on the Chat trip to Delphi. Anyway, it didn't really matter to me, because I knew the history of this famous temple 67 kilometers from Athens.
The Cape itself is mentioned in Homer's Odyssey, and was also famous as the spot where King Aegeus of Athens threw himself off when he saw the black sail on his son Theseus' ship returning from Crete (Theseus had promised to use a white sail if he succeeded in killing the Minotaur, but had forgotten to use it in the excitement of getting home, and his father thought he had died.) The temple itself was built by the Athenians in 440 BC to honour Poseidon, god of the sea, after he lost the naming rights to their city in a contest with Athena. The Athenians wanted to keep on his good side. It must have worked, because Athens had the most powerful navy in the world in ancient times. The temple was a place of frequent worship by seafarers and naval powers for centuries, until it was destroyed by order of the Christian emperor Arcadious in 399 AD. Despite that, many of its columns remained and have been largely reconstructed so that it looks impressive today, even as a ruin, perched on its cliff-side promontory at sunset.
The tour bus takes you from Athens past several beach-side suburbs until you reach the gift-shop and cafe area near the temple. Then you walk a short distance to the temple itself. Even with a crowd of tourists around, it's an impressive ruin. You can also walk some distance away to an adjacent promontory and get a photo of the temple with the sea behind. If you're lucky, you'll get a red sunset, with the white temple pillars standing out in stark contrast,
Tourists have been coming here for centuries. Many now look for Lord Byron's name, which he carved into the base of one of the columns in 1811.
I enjoyed our trip, which satisfied a childhood ambition. The CHAT Tour is expensive, compared to the public bus from Syntagma Square for 14 Euros return. But the tour bus gets you to Cape Sounion in 45 minutes whereas the public bus stops at all stations and takes two hours. That's time you could spend enjoying the view.
Either way, the real question is: "Do you really want to travel 70 kilometers from Athens to look at an old temple on a cliff above Homer's wine-dark sea?" Well, if you know the history and you feel the romance of this famous classical spot, the answer should be "Yes!". It was worth the trip to me, just to see in real life the place I'd seen in Colin Simpson's book as a child. I expected it to be romantic and impressive, both. I was not disappointed.