The Heraion stands at the very tip of the Perachora peninsula, at Cape Melagavi, where the land runs out into the Corinthian Gulf. It belongs to the regional unit of Corinth, in the Peloponnese, although it lies on the northern side of the canal — you reach it from Athens without crossing into the Peloponnese at all. The drive takes about an hour and a half, and the road ends at the site.

It was a sanctuary of Hera, and it was in use for well over a thousand years.

One sanctuary or two

Worship began here in the Geometric period. Around 800 BC a small apsidal temple was built by the harbour — the first of several, and almost nothing of it survives.

In the sixth century BC a new Doric temple replaced it, further west: a long rectangular building of about 10 by 31 metres, with an altar in front of it carved with triglyphs. Its roof tiles were marble. Winged Victories stood at the four corners of the roof and marble korai from Paros at the centre. Inside, the cella was divided into three aisles by two rows of columns, and at the western end stood a wooden statue of the goddess, replaced by a marble one in the fourth century BC.

Two hundred metres away, a second group of buildings was excavated. For a long time the two were treated as separate sanctuaries — Hera Akraia, of the headland, and Hera Limenia, of the harbour — and archaeologists argued about which was which.

More recent work has settled it. There was one sanctuary, and the goddess was Hera Akraia-Limenia.

What was found

Among the finds were two hundred bronze bowls of a type used for pouring libations and for purification. Their number has led some researchers to suggest that an oracle operated here, alongside the temple.

The site was excavated between 1930 and 1933 by Humfry Payne, then director of the British School at Athens. The wider area was formally declared an archaeological site in 1991.

What you see

The sanctuary sits on two levels, at the water's edge, in a small bay enclosed by low rock.

Most of it is at foundation level: the outline of the temple, the altar, the long west court that served as a marketplace, cisterns cut into the rock, and the line of the harbour. Standing in it, you can see how the whole thing was arranged around the little bay — which is why ships came here.

Above the site, on the highest point of the cape, is the lighthouse of Melagavi, first lit at the end of the nineteenth century. It was kept dark through the Second World War, relit in 1947, electrified in 1982, and listed as a historic monument in 2001. A path leads up to it, and a small chapel of Agios Nikolaos stands nearby.

And directly below the temple there is a beach — the only one in Greece inside an archaeological site. People swim there.