Visiting The Valley of The Temples, Sicily

Pick Your Entrance + Route in Advance

The whole site extends over a much larger area than some people may expect – 3,212 acres to be precise. It also involves quite a bit of walking, so that’s really important to appreciate before you arrive if you have health or mobility issues.

As we’ve mentioned, there are two entrances to the Valley of the Temples archaeological park, and the park is split into two zones. This caused us a bit of confusion when doing research for our own visit, but it’s actually really simple!

Note that temples are often referred to by several names – the Greek, the Italian, or the English – and we’ve used the English primiarily below.

Eastern Zone

In this area, you will find the three most complete and well-preserved ruins – they’re sort of the superstars of the park.

This includes the 6th century Temple of Hercules, the oldest temple in Agrigento, and the stunning Temple of Concordia, one of the best preserved Doric temples in existence in the world. There’s also a cafe and free public toilets.

This entrance is just outside the Temple of Juno (Hera Lacinia), find it here on Google Maps)

Western Zone

Home to the magnificent Temple of Zeus / Jupiter (thought to have been the greatest Doric temple of the west), the Temple of Castore and Polluce, and a Sanctuary dedicated to the goddesses Demetria and Kore. It also had some adorable goats indigenous to the island which they’re trying to preserve!

The entrance and car park can be found here on Google Maps.

So, East or West?

Everybody will explore the the two zones during their visit and your ticket covers both, so it really isn’t a big deal whether you arrive at one or the other. The western entrance probably has more parking spaces and would be the ‘main’ entry point, but that’s just splitting hairs.

The route along the dusty path to all the temples and ruins is obvious, and quite well sign-posted (although many of the other signs and explanations in the park could be improved).

In total, it’s a little over 2 km from the western entrance to the eastern entrance, and we’d expect that two to three hours would be adequate for most visitors to explore all the main temples in both zones.

The only real inconvenience from the layout is that whichever car park or entrance you choose to enter from, you’ll have to retrace your steps to get back to your car. It’s for this reason – plus the horribly high summer temperatures – that they introduced a handy little intra-park…