Venetian Castle of Nafpaktos

On the northern shore of the Gulf of Corinth, about 18 kilometres northeast of Patras, the harbour town of Nafpaktos is dominated by a hillside fortress usually called the Venetian Castle of Nafpaktos, though its walls carry the marks of three different empires. A fortified acropolis has stood on this hill since the Byzantine period, when Nafpaktos briefly served as capital of the thema (province) of Nikopolis in the 10th and 11th centuries; that early castle covered only the hilltop, leaving the lower town and harbour unprotected.

The fortress took the form visitors see today after Venice purchased the town in 1407. Over the following decades the Venetians extended the walls down to the sea, added modern bastions, and divided the fortification into five successive defensive zones, separated by transverse walls that step down the hillside from the citadel at the top to the small harbour below. The completed circuit runs to roughly 2,250 metres, enclosing about 30 towers and bastions with walls between 2.5 and 3.5 metres thick; the squarer towers are Byzantine in origin, while the rounded, truncated-cone bastions, including the well-known "Oraia Tapia" on the fourth tier, are later Venetian additions. Two small bastions guarding the harbour mouth were once linked by a chain that could be raised to seal the port.

Venetian rule ended in 1499, when Ottoman forces captured the town under Sultan Bayezid II; the Ottomans held it, with one interruption, until Greek independence. That interruption came in 1687, during the Morean War, when the Venetian commander Francesco Morosini retook Nafpaktos, only for the town to be handed back to the Ottomans in 1699 under the Treaty of Karlowitz. Ottoman rule finally ended when Greek forces liberated the town on 18 April 1829.

Nafpaktos is better known internationally by its old Italian name, Lepanto, after the naval Battle of Lepanto fought on 7 October 1571 near the Echinades islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Patras, some distance west of the town itself. There, the combined Christian fleet of the Holy League, Spain, the Papal States and Venice, destroyed the main battle fleet of the Ottoman Empire in one of history's most consequential naval engagements. The young Spanish soldier Miguel de Cervantes fought in the battle and lost the use of his left hand; a statue in his honour now stands on the town's small Venetian harbour, still one of the best-preserved Venetian ports in Greece.

Today the castle is considered one of the best-preserved medieval fortifications in the country, with most of its walls standing at close to their original height. From the citadel at its summit, reached in about ten minutes by car or up to three-quarters of an hour on foot from the port, the view takes in the town, the harbour, and the Gulf of Corinth beyond, a stretch of coastline many travellers first see while exploring Greece's coast by boat.