The Lion Gate is the thing everyone remembers. Two stone lionesses, facing each other across a central column, stand over the entrance to the citadel, carved some three and a half thousand years ago in the Bronze Age, and the walls beside the gate are built of boulders so huge that later Greeks thought only the Cyclopes could have lifted them. Inside is a royal burial ground, the Grave Circles, where in 1876 the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann found gold masks and weapons, and declared that he had looked upon the face of Agamemnon. The mask is older than Agamemnon would have been, but the name stuck.
Mycenae was the centre of a civilisation that dominated the Greek world between about 1600 and 1200 BC, and its stories fed the epics of Homer, the myths of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and the tragedies of Aeschylus. Nearby, the Treasury of Atreus, a beehive tomb with a magnificent corbelled dome, is one of the best-preserved Mycenaean monuments, entered through a long stone passage. The site was listed by UNESCO in 1999.
The surroundings are stark and beautiful. The citadel sits on a ridge between two hills, above a dry valley of olive groves and orange orchards in the Argolid, and the view stretches down to the plain and the sea. The roads from Nafplio or Argos are narrow and gently winding, with traffic that is light outside the main tourist season. In summer the sun is merciless, and the site has little shade, so go early, carry water, and wear a hat.
Services are limited close to the site. The village of Mykines is small, so fill the tank in Argos or Nafplio, where there are petrol stations and many places to eat. Nafplio, the first capital of modern Greece, is a handsome seaside town with a Venetian fortress above it and is a good place to stay. The ride continues toward Athens and the monastery of Daphni, with its eleventh-century mosaics, so the day covers the Bronze Age, Byzantium and the long road between them.