Preveza: the Town, and Staying Just North of It

The part worth your evenings is the old quarter around Seitan Pazar — a grid of pedestrian lanes packed with tavernas, and the waterfront promenade along the harbour where the town walks at night. Preveza runs on sardines from the Ambracian Gulf; the tavernas grill them, and in August the town throws an entire festival for them.

It is a real town rather than a resort strip, which means it works outside July too: supermarkets, pharmacies and a year-round fish market. The trade is that it is busy in August and quiet in the shoulder months.

By air: Aktion airport (PVK) sits across the water on the Aktio side, linked to Preveza by an undersea tunnel — eight kilometres and twelve to eighteen minutes from the apartments. By sea: ferries from Italy dock at Igoumenitsa, roughly an hour north by road. By car: about four hours from Athens on the Ionian motorway.

Lefkada needs no ferry at all — it is connected to the mainland by a floating bridge at Aktio, a forty-minute drive, which is what makes it a day trip rather than an overnight.

The headline sight is Ancient Nikopolis — the sprawling Roman city Octavian founded after Actium, ten minutes north. It is on Greece’s UNESCO tentative list, not an inscribed World Heritage Site, and it is still worth a morning. After that the agenda is beaches up the coast, a day on the Acheron river, a day in Lefkada, and the town’s own festival calendar — the carnival, the choral festival and the sardine festival all land in season.

The season typically runs June to September, and the booking calendar always shows the dates that are actually open. Early June and September are the quietest weeks and the water stays warm into September; the first half of August is the busiest fortnight on this coast.