Greece’s first national park is still the gods’ address
Mount Olympus, an Aegean massif on the Thessaly–Macedonia border about 80 kilometres southwest of Thessaloniki, holds 52 peaks and deep gorges. Mytikas—“nose”—tops Greece at 2,917.727 metres and ranks among Europe’s most topographically prominent summits.
Greek myth housed the Olympian gods here. Greece’s first national park (1938) and a World Biosphere Reserve, the wider Olympus area gained UNESCO mixed World Heritage status in July 2026 for nature and culture together. Hikers usually start from Litochoro on the eastern foothills, about 100 kilometres from Thessaloniki and only 18 kilometres from the sea beneath a tower nearly 3,000 metres high.
Sedimentary rock laid down in a shallow sea about 200 million years ago later rose; glaciers around one million years ago carved plateaus and depressions. The massif spans roughly 500 square kilometres, averages 26 kilometres across, and rings about 80 kilometres. Peaks such as Aghios Antonios (2,815 m), Toumpa (2,801 m), and Profitis Ilias (2,803 m) surround the Muses’ Plateau at 2,550 metres.
Etymology is murky—pre-Greek “mountain,” or folk “pure foot”—and Homer sometimes uses Olympos as a sky synonym. Maquis on the dry Xirokampi foothills shelters wild boar while Dion’s plain drinks Olympus streams. Seen from Litochoro, the skyline forms a V between Mytikas and Stefani, the Throne of Zeus at 2,902 metres, whose final 200-metre rise is the climbers' hardest test. West of the summits the Megala Kazania drops away as a sheer amphitheatre some 700 metres deep.
Ancient Greeks named the highest hill in many regions Olympus, but by the fifth century BC Herodotus identified this Thessalian peak as the gods' true seat. At its foot, Dion, the Macedonians' holy city of Zeus, thrived for a thousand years and has been excavated since 1928; near Pydna the Romans crushed the Macedonians in 168 BC. The mountain later sheltered klephts rebelling against Ottoman rule, served as a centre of the Greek Resistance under German occupation, and saw the Civil War begin at Litochoro in 1946. A sixteenth-century chapel on Profitis Ilias, at 2,803 metres, is Orthodox Christianity's highest.
Source: Mount Olympus
