Parthenon: free audio guide, hours and tickets

The Parthenon is the marble temple of Athena Parthenos on the Acropolis of Athens, built from 447 BC under Pericles. It has no ticket or gate of its own: you see it with the €30 Acropolis ticket, and from 1 November to 31 March the site is open from 08:00 to 17:00. This is its free audio guide, in English.

What the audio guide covers

It is free, plays on this page in your phone’s browser with no app and no sign-up, and lasts about 8 minutes. The first half tells the story: the goddess the temple was built for, what stood on the rock before it, the Persian wars, Pericles and the men who designed and decorated it, and what happened to the building in the centuries after: a church, a mosque, the explosion of 1687 and the sculptures that went to London.

The second half is for when you are standing in front of it. It asks you to look up at the Doric columns, notice the 3 steps the temple stands on, find the metopes between the triglyphs and imagine the cella and the gold-and-ivory statue of Athena that once filled it. It ends with an invitation to sit for a moment and watch the light on the marble.

Points of interest the audio guide stops at, and what you will see there:

Hours and tickets in winter

From 1 November to 31 March the Acropolis is open from 08:00 to 17:00, with the last entry at 16:30. From April to August it stays open until 20:00. It is closed on 1 January, 25 March, 1 May, Easter Sunday and 25 and 26 December.

The Parthenon is inside the site, so the ticket is the Acropolis one: €30 full and €15 reduced, sold at the ticket offices and online on tickets.hh.gr, the Ministry of Culture’s official shop. Online tickets are for a date and time slot, valid for a single entry, can be changed up to 2 hours before your visit, up to 2 times, and are non-refundable. Under-18s, and 18- to 25-year-olds from Greece or the EU, get in free with ID; the full list is on our Acropolis page.

Free audio guideAcropolis of Athens

The Parthenon today: the west front, free of scaffolding

You come up through the Propylaea, the gateway on the west side of the rock, so the first thing you see is the Parthenon’s west front. Since June 2026 it looks more complete than at any time in about 220 years. The Acropolis Monuments Restoration Service has finished restoring the west pediment, setting 2 upright blocks into the empty places of its tympanum, the back wall of the pediment: one rebuilt from ancient fragments joined with new marble, the other carved entirely from new marble. The outer scaffolding on the west front has been removed for good.

Walk along the north side towards the east end, where the temple’s main entrance was. Inside the colonnade, a scaffolding tower was still standing in February 2026, as the photo at the top of this page shows. When you are on the rock, stay on the marked paths, and take care near areas where work is in progress.

The temple was designed by Iktinos and Kallikrates, and the sculptor Phidias, a friend of Pericles, oversaw the work. Building began in 447 BC and was finished 15 years later. The architects gave its straight lines almost invisible curves, the famous refinements. The cella was split into 2 rooms: the larger, entered from the east, held Phidias’s gold-and-ivory Athena; the smaller, at the west end, was the room the Athenians called the “parthenon”, and it gave the whole building its name.

Where to see the sculptures: the Acropolis Museum and London

The best place to see the Parthenon’s carvings is the Parthenon Gallery, on the third floor of the Acropolis Museum, at Dionysiou Areopagitou 15, just below the rock. The gallery is a glass-walled hall built around a core with the same orientation and size as the temple’s cella. The blocks of the Ionic frieze run around it in the same order they had on the building, only lower so you can see them, the metopes stand in pairs between steel columns, and the pediment figures are on low pedestals at each end. Through the glass you look straight up at the Parthenon.

The gallery combines the original marbles with plaster casts of the pieces kept in the British Museum and other museums abroad. The Acropolis Museum costs €20, €10 reduced. From 1 November to 31 March it opens at 09:00 and closes at 17:00 from Monday to Thursday, at 22:00 on Fridays and at 20:00 on Saturdays and Sundays.

In London, the British Museum shows the sculptures removed by Lord Elgin’s agents between 1801 and 1812 in Room 18, and entry is free. They are about half of the temple’s surviving sculpture, so seeing both, in Athens and in London, is the closest you can get today to the full set.

Free audio guideBritish Museum

Getting there and the rest of the Acropolis

Take metro line 2 to Acropolis station and walk up Dionysiou Areopagitou Street to the main entrance on the west slope, about 12 minutes on foot; from Monastiraki, on lines 1 and 3, you walk up through Plaka or the Ancient Agora. Only small backpacks and handbags are allowed in, and the cloakroom north of the Main Entrance does not take large luggage. The toilets inside the site are being renovated, so use the ones by the Main Entrance before you go in.

For visitors with reduced mobility, a lift north of the Main Entrance goes up the rock to the area north of the Erechtheion, from where an accessible route runs along the north side of the Parthenon to its east front. As of 24 October 2026 the lift is working; its status can change from one day to the next, so check on the day and call the Acropolis guards on +30 213 1317762 1 hour before you arrive. It does not run in bad weather or strong winds.

The same ticket covers the rest of the rock. Next to the gateway, the small Temple of Athena Nike stands on its bastion, and the walk down by the South Slope takes you past the Theatre of Dionysus. Once you leave, the ticket does not let you back in.

Free audio guideTemple of Athena Nike

About 600 m north-west of the rock, on the hill at the western edge of the Ancient Agora, the Temple of Hephaestus still has its 34 Doric columns, its entablature and both pediments. It has no ticket of its own: it is covered by the €20 Ancient Agora ticket. All our audio guides for the city are on the Athens page.

Free audio guideTemple of Hephaestus