Built on the mouth of the Pagasitic Gulf and sheltered by idyllic Mount Pelion, Volos is a major Thessalian town that still retains a certain charm despite it being partially destroyed by the 1950s earthquakes. A wide sea front promenade is the pleasant façade to a bustling town where old and new mix in often delightful combinations.
The dull impression of Volos’ concrete apartment blocks built on a grid plan is tempered by the many surviving neoclassical buildings from the 19th and 20th centuries, many of which impressive mansions of the town’s rich and powerful. Evidence of Volos’ past status as an important tobacco processing centre still exists in the surviving tobacco warehouses. On the seafront the Papastratos cigarette manufacture houses today the University of Thessaly.
Tucked in narrow alleys the famous tsipouradika still hold the age-old tradition of offering tsipouro, a highly alcoholic drink similar to ouzo, accompanied by a vast variety of local delicacies (in fact famed to be the best seafood meze in Greece). The Nea Ionia municipality was created in the 1920s and 1930s to house the refugees from Asia Minor and parts of it keep an old-time charm with clusters of white-washed houses.
Around Volos
Suburb of Volos, Anakassia, on the road to Pelion is home to the delightful Museum of Theophilos, an early 20th century folk artist from Lesvos whose works are today exhibited in the Louvre.
Mount Pelion, the mythological habitat of the Centaurs, is famous for its idyllic villages, wooded cliffs and secluded beaches. Places to visit in Pelion include Portaria, Makrynitsa, Zagora, Chania and Tsangarada.
