Among these are the thousands who attend performances in the ancient Theatre of the Asklepieion of Epidavros. Thanks to the Epidavros Festival and the revival of ancient drama, since 1955 Lygourio has been a favourite meeting place of stage directors, actors and theatre-lovers.
The town of Lygourio is seat of the Municipality of Epidavros, with a population of about 2,700, involved mainly with cultivating olives, apricots and vegetables.
Stock-raising is also developed. Another basic sector of the local economy is tourism, with enterprises catering to all tastes and ensuring a pleasant and comfortable stay.
Lygourio and its environs are home to monuments of various periods. Visible at the highest point of the town are remains of the fortification of Lessa, the ancient city located here. Northwest of the settlement, the foundation of the “pyramid” survive. The ancient building is thought to have been a guardhouse. In the area of Paligourio, at the foot of Mount Arachnaios, are the ruins of a Medieval fortification, while the much earlier Mycenaean installation attests, among other things, the existence of an unexplored cemetery with tholos tombs.
Tradition has it that Lygourio is protected by 50 churches (including the rural chapels). Several of these are Byzantine and Post-Byzantine in date. We mention indicatively the church of the Dormition of the Virgin (Panagitsa), dated to 1701 and the interior of which is covered by wall-paintings, the church of St John Eleemon, a seventeenth-century monument preserving parts of the masonry from the first building phase in the eleventh century, the small basilica of St Athanasios, which was renovated in 1622, and others.
