Barcelona to Athens

This site aims to provide detailed information on cheap and easy transit options across the often difficult-to-navigate Balkan coastal region, all the way from Italy down to Greece. You'll also find background on cities to visit as well as a few recommendations of my favorite places.

Traveling the EU is cake since there is no border control between the countries and they all use the same currency, but the balkans provide a certain level of complexity due Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Albania NOT being part of the EU, making international public transportation iffy and confusing. Not to mention trains are sparse and buses don’t always cross borders. But never fear, it can be done, and it really ain’t so bad.

I hope this info is helpful and encouraging, because I recommend this trip to anyone who has not spent time in this seriously awesome region. While the trip was mostly along the coast, the cities visited were rich in history, beauty, and culture making the ocean a nice backdrop, but not necessarily a day’s event.

The Route

You can start and end this trip wherever you like. You don’t have to go all the way from Spain to Greece (it’s far) and if you have less time you can pick your own array of adjacent countries. All that’s required are two decently sized airports (for a reasonably priced plane ticket), and they’re sprinkled along the route. While I started in Barcelona, my boyfriend joined the trip by flying into Milan, Italy. There is also Marseille, France; Ljubljana, Slovenia; Zagreb and Dubrovnik, Croatia; and Tirana, Albania. We finished and flew out of Athens, Greece together.

Disclaimer – The focus of this site is to give a general itinerary and show a possible route through the Balkans, mainly from Italy down to Greece. It’s not a guide-book detailing what to see, although I do offer a few tips on some of the cities we visited. When we were trying to plan this trip ahead of time, it was very difficult to find any sort of concrete info about how to get from place to place, so our goal is to help people do just that. Whether or not you are taking this exact route or only bits and pieces of it, the idea is to provide valuable information on otherwise obscure areas.

I hope you enjoy the site!

-Alana