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Acropolis Virtual Tour: How to See the Sacred Rock in 360°

The Acropolis is the most photographed monument in Greece and one of the hardest to see in peace. Through the summer the Sacred Rock takes thousands of visitors a day, and the queue at the entrance eats the time you wanted to spend in front of the Parthenon.

A virtual tour does not replace the visit. It does two things the visit cannot. It lets you stand in front of a capital for as long as you like, and it shows you detail no visitor standing below can resolve.

Below are four 360° virtual tours of the Acropolis and the Acropolis Museum. All four are free, all four open in a browser with nothing to install, and all four come from the organisations that hold the monuments. We opened every one before recommending it.

1. The Acropolis Virtual Tour, by the Acropolis Restoration Service

If you want the monuments themselves rather than the exhibits, start here. It covers the Parthenon, the Propylaia, the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike, from panoramic photography shot between 2010 and 2014 by the Acropolis Restoration Service with Culturplay.

Its strength is resolution. The images are gigapixel, so you can zoom into architectural detail past the point a visitor standing below could ever resolve it. The fluting on the columns, the marks left by the restoration, the joints in the marble.

You choose your own viewpoints, so in practice you walk your own route across the rock. A Greek version is available from the language switch at the top of the page.

Open the Acropolis virtual tour

2. The Acropolis Museum in a 360° virtual tour

The Acropolis Museum offers its own virtual tour, as a 360° spherical video. The difference from the one above is real. Here you are not looking at the monuments, you are looking at what came off them, in the rooms where it is displayed today.

You look in any direction inside the galleries, with the sense of standing among the exhibits. The Caryatids and the Parthenon sculptures are what will hold you longest.

Open the Acropolis Museum virtual tour

3. The Parthenon Gallery, as a tour of its own

The Museum has a second tour devoted only to the Parthenon Gallery, the glass floor laid out on the orientation of the real temple.

It earns a separate mention because the room is designed so the frieze reads in the order it had on the monument. In a tour where you control the pace, that sequence comes across far more clearly than it does on a normal visit, when you are moving with a crowd.

Open the Parthenon Gallery tour

4. Google Arts & Culture, and which to open first

The fourth option is the Museum's profile on Google Arts & Culture, which carries virtual tours of the interior and the third floor alongside 227 items from the collection and five online exhibits. It is the richest in material and the least immersive in feel.

Open the Acropolis Museum on Google Arts & Culture

Which to open first. For the monuments on the rock, start with the Acropolis Restoration Service tour. It is the only one that puts you on the archaeological site itself. For the sculptures, go to the Acropolis Museum. For the frieze specifically, go to the Parthenon Gallery.

Greek monuments we have digitised ourselves. None of the tours above is ours. We do work on exactly this: submarine Proteus S-113, destroyer Velos D-16, the Kythira Semaphore Telegraph, the Nicopolis Museum and Hagia Sophia.

Museums, archaeological sites and collections are among the projects we take on most often. Tell us where the space is, its floor area and how many rooms you want covered, and we will come back with a specific proposal. Talk to us.