Elea-Velia

Getting there

The Park has no car park of its own: the motorhome is left on the open ground in front of the entrance or in the residential street a little further on, and on foot you pass under the railway.

• The entrance is in piazzale Amedeo Maiuri, north of Marina di Ascea: the Park advises searching for "Parco archeologico di Velia" on the satnav. In front is the open ground of earth where you leave the motorhome, and through the railway underpass you reach the gate and the ticket office
• The Park writes that it has no reserved car park: the open ground is free in winter, partly paid in summer, and whether a motorhome may stay there at night nobody says. Three hundred metres away, in via dei Medici Eleatici, there is another free car park
• By train get off at Ascea station, on the Tyrrhenian line between Naples and Reggio Calabria, two and a half kilometres from the entrance
• From Paestum, on the first Sunday of the month, the Park runs a free shuttle between the two sites; ask the Park for the times

Practical information

The ticket is bought at the ticket office at the entrance, open from 8:30 to 18:30, or online, and there is no need to book.

Contacts

Where it is

Ascea · Campania

You set off from

Notes

• Opening hours, read on 13 October 2026: the Park is open every day from 8:30 to 19:30, with last entry at 18:30, and is closed on 25 December and 1 January; on 1 January 2026, however, it opened from 10:00 to 14:00, and for Christmas 2026 it has not said anything yet. In winter the acropolis closes earlier, and after that only the lower town can be visited: at 16:30 from 25 October to 13 November, at 16:00 from 14 November to 31 December, at 16:30 from 2 to 22 January, at 17:00 from 23 January to 12 February, at 17:30 from 13 February to 12 March, at 18:30 from 13 to 28 March. The Park also gives the time of the last complete visit, from an hour to an hour and a half earlier: between mid November and New Year it is 15:00
• Tickets, with the price list in force since 3 October 2023: a single ticket for Velia and for Paestum, the excavations and the museum, valid for three days. From December to February 10 euros, from March to November 15; from 18 to 25 2 euros, and under 18 entry is free, as it is for people with disabilities and those accompanying them. The one-year pass costs 30 euros, 10 from 18 to 25. For reductions, show your ID before paying
• Free days: the first Sunday of every month, 25 April, 2 June and 4 November, without booking: the free ticket is collected at the ticket office. On the first Sundays, in the last two years, the Park has put on a guided walk at 10:00 on the Crinale degli Dei, the Ridge of the Gods, the sacred terraces beyond Porta Rosa between the acropolis and the hill, meeting at 9:30 at the ticket office and with compulsory booking, and the visit with the headsets of Immersive Velia, the city reconstructed in 3D, included in the ticket. Whether the Crinale can be walked on your own on other days the Park does not say
• What there is and what there is not: the toilets are inside, next to the entrance, and at the ticket office there is the bookshop; there is no bar, restaurant or cloakroom, and inside you may not eat or drink, smoke or enter with large rucksacks. Lunch is in the motorhome. Apart from the Crinale on the first Sundays and the August evenings, the Park does not organise guided tours: ask the Region's licensed guides or the services concessionaire
• The lower town: from the gate the path runs along the walls, a circuit of five kilometres already in the sixth century BC, and in front of the walls the small mausoleums of the Roman necropolis, of the first and second centuries AD, with the gravestones of a veteran of the fleet and of a knight who died in a storm along this coast. You enter through Porta Marina Sud, with its square tower, and along via di Porta Marina you come on the right to a public building from the age of Augustus with a three-armed cryptoporticus, where the herms and statues of the city's physicians were found: perhaps a gymnasium, perhaps the medical school. A little further on is the Masseria Cobellis, a nineteenth century farmhouse built on top of a Roman building with a nymphaeum
• The baths and the sanctuary: climbing towards Porta Rosa there are the Roman baths of the second century AD, with the frigidarium in black and white mosaic, animals and sea monsters; in the Middle Ages the pool of the calidarium became a baptismal font. Above it, the sanctuary of Asclepius, the Asklepieion, on three terraces: the lowest is a square thirty metres by seventeen with a portico on three sides. Further on are the Hellenistic baths, of the third century BC, with seated tubs arranged in a circle, and below the acropolis the Casa degli affreschi, the House of the Frescoes, a house of the second century BC with more than thirty rooms, which partly preserves its painted plaster
• Porta Rosa stands at the narrowest point of the gorge that divides the headland in two, and dates from the end of the fourth century BC: a round arch of sandstone blocks laid dry, with a relieving arch above. It was not a gate but a viaduct: underneath passed the road between the southern and northern districts, on top the one that climbed to the acropolis. It was buried as early as the third century BC, and the earth preserved it. The paved street that climbs to it is via di Porta Rosa. In 2009 it was closed after a boulder fell, and it reopened in 2011
• The acropolis is the top of the headland, at about seventy metres above the sea, where the first settlement of the Phocaeans stood. There are the theatre, rebuilt by the Romans, with about twenty rows of steps for about two thousand spectators and the view over the plain; the base of the great temple, in a sanctuary that the Park says was probably Athena's, where in 2022 an older archaic temple was also announced; and the medieval village of Castellammare della Bruca, with the Angevin tower of the late thirteenth century, the Palatine Chapel and the church of Santa Maria di Portosalvo. The chapel and the church house the exhibition: in the first the early decades of the Phocaean city, in the second everyday life and the school of Parmenides and Zeno. That they close with the acropolis in winter is likely, but the Park does not say so. From the top the sea is far away: the rivers Alento and Palistro have filled the coast with earth, and the headland, which was on the sea, today looks over a plain
• In summer, on August evenings, the Park opens the lower town and the acropolis from 20:00 to midnight for concerts, theatre and accompanied tours; they are on the Marina di Ascea page, with the other events
• The name Elea was taken by Adriano Olivetti for his company's computers, in the 1950s
• The ticket is also valid for Paestum for three days, with the museum: anyone sleeping around here uses it the next day

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