About Olympia, Greece

See the site of the original Olympic Games on the Peloponnese peninsula. Olympia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and sanctuary of ancient Greece, hosted the Olympic Games for a thousand years. It is also a complex of temples and public buildings. Here you will find the ruins of the gymnasium, palaestra (wrestling school), and Pheidias’ workshop, where one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World was sculpted, the massive ivory-and-gold Statue of Zeus. Olympia is also home to the actual stadium of the games and the bouleuterion (council house), which contains the altar of oaths where competitors swore to obey the rules decreed by the Olympic Senate.