Athens, Aegina & Hydra: 5-Day Food & Saronic Islands Hopping Tour

Athens and Saronic Island Hopping Tour at a Glance

• From 789€ per person (double occupancy) 989€ per person (single occupancy).
• Starts: Athens (arrival day) 
• Ends: Piraeus, Athens (ferry arrival around 12:30 to 1:00 PM on Day 5) 
• Islands: Aegina and Hydra, in the Saronic Gulf On the plate: a full Athens food tour, plus island tavernas and Aegina pistachios 
• On foot and by ferry: island hopping without the long coach days
• Recommend booking departure flights after 3:00 PM on Day 5.

What This Multi-Day Athens and Islands Food Tour Makes So Special

On paper this is a five-day tour with hotels and ferries. What you are really buying is time, and the quiet that comes with having enough of it.

Most people meet these islands from a deck. A Saronic islands day cruise from Athens gives you ninety minutes on Hydra and a wave at Aegina as the boat pulls away, and then you are home for dinner, sunburnt and a little unsure what you saw. This tour goes the other way. You sleep on Aegina for two nights, long enough to learn which taverna the fishermen use. You cross to Hydra with a whole morning to spend, not a countdown. And in Athens you eat the way the city actually eats, not the way the guidebook tells you to.

Athens first, islands second, food and a slower clock all the way through. 

Your 5-Day Athens, Aegina and Hydra Itinerary

So this is what awaits you in detail: 

Day 1: Arrival in Athens and the Highlights and Dinner Tour

You land, you drop your bags, and the afternoon is yours to do nothing with. Then, as the heat softens, the trip begins in earnest with the Athens Highlights and Dinner Tour at 6:00 PM. The landmarks first, and then the streets that run between them, the ones that smell of grilled meat and evening. Dinner closes the night, somewhere Greek and unhurried. You sleep in Athens, already a little in.

Day 2: Acropolis Tour and Athens Food Tour

The morning belongs to the Sacred Rock. A guided Acropolis tour at 10:00 AM, about two hours among the Parthenon and the stones around it, with a Greek snack in hand as you go. Then the part we know best. An Athens food tour of roughly three hours through the markets and the family-run eateries, the food tour of Athens people book us for on its own, where a baker knows us by name and the cheese is cut for you at the counter. The afternoon is free, for a rooftop and a cold drink, or for Plaka and Monastiraki with no particular plan. Overnight in Athens.

Day 3: Aegina, the Pistachio Island, and a Bike Tour

A morning transfer takes you to the ferry from Piraeus, and forty minutes later Athens is behind you and Aegina is coming up out of the water, harbour first. It is the largest of the Saronic islands and the closest, and it wears that closeness lightly. You check in, then take a guided Aegina bike tour along the coast roads, through the villages, past the pistachio groves that give the island its name and half its smell. The rest of the day is yours. A swim, a slow lap of Aegina Town, a chair at the harbour as the fishing boats come in. Overnight on Aegina.

Day 4: Hydra Day Trip to the Car-Free Island

A morning ferry carries you to Hydra, and the first thing you notice is what is missing. No cars. No motorbikes, no bikes, no engines at all. A guided Hydra walking tour leads you up through the old stone mansions and the car-free lanes, where the loudest sound is a donkey’s hooves on marble and a cat deciding whether to move. The middle of the day is yours, for lunch at the water, a shop you did not plan to enter, or a swim off the rocks. You sail back to Aegina as the light goes gold. Overnight on Aegina.

Day 5: Ferry Back to Athens and Departure

One last slow morning on Aegina, a coffee you do not rush, and then the 11:30 AM ferry to Athens. You reach Piraeus around 12:30 to 1:00 PM, salt still in your hair. If you are flying out the same day, book your flight for after 3:00 PM, so the last ferry stays a ferry and not a sprint to the gate.

The Food in Athens and Island Tavernas

Athens sets the table. Over the food-tour morning you try more than a dozen things, the way people here actually eat them. It starts small, a Greek coffee and a koulouri, the way most of the city begins its day. Then the bakeries, for spanakopita and bougatsa handed to you still warm from the oven. Dips and olives and oil that tastes of the tree it came from, Greek cheeses, thick yogurt. Later a proper cooked meal, and mezze at a taverna with local wine or tsipouro, the plates arriving until you tell them to stop.

Then the islands change the menu, and the Greek islands food tour begins. On Aegina, it is the pistachio, grown here since the late 1800s and protected across the EU by its own name. Locals call it green gold, and they are only half joking. You eat it whole from a harbor shop, still a little warm from roasting, and again in ice cream, in brittle, in pastries you did not know it hid inside. Around it sits the rest of an island kitchen, fish straight off the boats, cheese, whatever the season decided to grow. On Hydra you eat at the harbor, where the tavernas face the water and time the ferries in and out.

Vegetarians and other dietary needs are looked after, gladly and without fuss. If you would rather the whole trip lean that way, our vegetarian food tour of Athens shows how we handle it.

Aegina: Pistachios, the Temple of Aphaia and the Harbour

Aegina sits about forty minutes from Piraeus by fast ferry, the largest island in the Saronic Gulf and the closest to Athens. Its harbour is a row of faded neoclassical houses above a fishing port that still, quietly, fishes.

The pistachio is the island’s name in food terms. The Aegina pistachio has carried Protected Designation of Origin status in Europe since the 1990s, grows small and green in the dry volcanic soil, and gets its own festival every September. 

The Temple of Aphaia, built around 480 BC, sits a short trip from town, one point of a sacred triangle with the Parthenon and the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, there for you if you want to spend free time on it.

Hydra: the Car-Free Island in the Saronic Gulf

Hydra has no cars. No motorbikes, no bicycles, nothing with an engine. The ban has held since the 1950s and the island has been protected since 1962, so the harbour you see is more or less the one the shipowners saw.

Everything moves on foot, by donkey, or by water taxi, which is why a Hydra day trip runs at the pace of a walk and not a schedule. The stone mansions around the port, the archontika, were built by seafaring families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the town gave more than its share to the Greek War of Independence. On a guided walk you get the alleys, the harbour, and the quiet that only a car-free island can hold.

Who This Athens and Island Hopping Tour Is For

This Athens island-hopping tour is for a first trip to Greece, when you want the city and the islands in one booking, sorted in advance, without spending your evenings decoding ferry timetables. It is for a return trip too, for the traveller who did the Athens loop years ago and wants the water this time, and the slower half of the country. 

And it suits couples, and families who would rather sit somewhere good for an hour than tick a fourth thing off a list. It stays a small group throughout. You will not be one of three hundred on a cruise deck, and by Day 3 the guide knows how you take your coffee.

Your Guide in Athens and on the Islands

The Athens days are led by a local, licensed guide who knows the shop and taverna owners by name and can tell you what you are eating and why it is on the plate. The group stays small enough that there is always room to ask, and to be answered properly. On the islands you are in the hands of local guides for the Aegina bike tour and the Hydra walking tour, people who live where you are standing.