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Piraeus sits at the edge of the Saronic Gulf, roughly ten kilometres south-west of central Athens, and has functioned as the Greek capital's principal port for more than two and a half millennia. The ancient Athenians understood its strategic value immediately: Themistocles fortified it in the fifth century BC, and the Long Walls that once connected it to Athens made the two cities effectively one defended unit. That relationship between Piraeus and Athens has never really dissolved. Today the port handles an extraordinary volume of ferry traffic, connecting the mainland to the Aegean islands, and the waterfront carries the particular energy of a place where arrivals and departures are constant and purposeful.

The city is not a conventional tourist destination in the way that the Plaka or Monastiraki are, and that distinction works in its favour for visitors who want to see how Athens actually functions at its edges. The Mikrolimano harbour, a small, roughly circular bay lined with seafood tavernas, offers a quieter counterpoint to the industrial scale of the main port. Zea Marina, nearby, is where private yachts and sailing boats moor, and the combination of the two gives this part of Piraeus a genuinely maritime character that goes beyond the purely commercial. The Archaeological Museum of Piraeus holds the remarkable Piraeus Apollo, a bronze kouros dating to around 530 BC and among the finest surviving examples of archaic Greek sculpture.