A couple of inadvertent castles

On our way from Olympia to Kalamata, we briefly detoured through Pylos--well, a couple of towns called Pylos because as we learned the hard way, Pylos is the Greek equivalent of Springfield, and there is one in every province.

The one we finally ended up in had a cave and an ancient palace that we tried to find.  Instead, we rather inadvertently stumbled upon two castle/fortresses--The Fortress of Pylos and the Navarino Castle.

The Fortress of Pylos was closed when we arrived at 3:15pm.  This is a beautiful picture from the parking lot.  We also have some other pictures from the beach looking up at it.  Architecturally, it looks amazing on Google maps, but we're not into this kind of ruin, so this was would have only been serendipitous.

Then, as we were wandering around Voidokolia Bay and Nestor's cave, we saw a structure on the top of the cliff, and after some exploring, we found in the distance The Navarino Castle, which was closed because of "serious danger".  It appeared that the site hadn't been maintained at all, and was unsafe for visitors as things were falling off/down.  But we got close enough to identify it as a medieval castle and therefore, something that was also not of particular to interest to us.