The island day trip from Athens that most visitors never get round to

Most people land in Athens, do the Acropolis, the Plaka and maybe Syntagma Square, then fly home having never left the mainland. This is a shame, because one of the easiest and most rewarding days out is sitting right in the Saronic Gulf, less than an hour from Piraeus.

Aegina doesn't get the attention of Santorini or Mykonos, mostly because it's not trying to be a postcard. It's a working island with its own harbour town, its own ancient site, and its own crop: pistachios, which cover the hillsides and show up in everything from the local ice cream to a sauce served with grilled fish.

Getting there and the town itself

Ferries leave Piraeus regularly, and depending on the boat you're on, the crossing takes anywhere from around 40 minutes to just over an hour. It's cheap enough and simple enough that you don't need to book a tour, just turn up at the port and buy a ticket.

Aegina town, where the ferry lands, is full of neoclassical buildings painted in faded yellows and ochres, a legacy of its brief spell as the first capital of modern Greece in the early 1800s. Walk along the harbourfront past the fishing boats and you'll find small tavernas doing a steady trade in grilled octopus and whatever came in that morning. A few streets back from the water, the Church of Panagitsa and the ruins at Kolona, a single standing column from an ancient temple to Apollo right on the sea, are worth ten minutes even if you're not usually one for ruins.

The Temple of Aphaia

The real reason to give Aegina a full day rather than a quick look round the harbour is the Temple of Aphaia, up in the hills on the eastern side of the island. It's one of the best-preserved temples from the Archaic period anywhere in Greece, older than the Parthenon, and built on a ridge surrounded by pine trees with views stretching across the Saronic Gulf towards the mainland.

Unlike the Acropolis, you can walk around it without a wall of other visitors in every photo. It's a short bus or taxi ride from Aegina town, and most people combine it with a stop in the quieter village of Agia Marina on the coast below.

For lunch, head to Perdika, a small fishing village on the opposite side of the island from where the ferry docks. It's little more than a row of tavernas along a narrow harbour, but the fish is landed metres away and there's a small island just offshore you can swim out to if the weather's warm.

When to go

Aegina works well as a day trip almost any time the ferries are running, but the best windows are spring, roughly April into May, and early autumn, September into October. The weather is warm enough to swim without the intensity of an Athens summer, the island isn't overwhelmed with day trippers from the capital, and if you're there in September you might catch the pistachio harvest, when the trees are being picked and the whole island smells faintly of them.

July and August bring bigger crowds and higher ferry prices, since Aegina is a popular weekend escape for Athenians themselves. Outside those months, you get the temple, the harbour and the tavernas largely to yourselves.

If you're planning time in Athens, it's worth building in a full day for this rather than treating it as an afterthought. Decide can help you work out which day makes most sense around the rest of your Athens itinerary and the ferry timetable.

Planning a visit? Our Athens guide has the essentials, and decide can plan the whole trip in about a minute.