Almyros begins, in a sense, about ten kilometers to the south, at the ruins of ancient Halos. Halos was a populous and important town, famous for its harbor and remembered for its role in the Persian Wars, and its ruins can still be visited. The geographer Stephanus of Byzantium was still naming it in the 6th century. When pirate raids made the old coastal sites untenable after the Byzantine era, people moved inland and built the town where Almyros stands today. Up on the old acropolis of Halos, a couple of stone towers survive, one crowning the highest point, the other lower down and overlooking the modern motorway, mute proof that the place kept living right through the Middle Ages.

Medieval Almyros, then called Halmyros, first appears in the records of the 11th century as a Christian diocese. Curiously, sources speak of "two Halmyroi," a pair of settlements: one on the site of ancient Halos, the other its associated port on the Pagasitic Gulf. Between two fortresses, one at the mouth of the Platanorrema, the other at the site now occupied by an airport, a lower town spread out, and stretches of its old city walls have been found in the ground between them. Almost nothing of the fortresses themselves remains. But for a few centuries this was no backwater. It was a port that mattered enough for distant powers to covet.

In 1158 a naval force under William I of Sicily fell on Halmyros, plundered it, and burned down the Pisan church of Saint Jacob, a detail that tells you how cosmopolitan this little port had become. Italian trading communities had settled here. The town's Venetians were hit hard in 1171, when the Byzantine emperor ordered the arrest of all Venetians living in his territory. By 1198 a charter of Alexios III Angelos was granting the Venetians special privileges in the "two Halmyroi," and after crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204, the "duo Almiri" were carved up among the new rulers. The deposed emperor Alexios III was even assigned to reside here as a private citizen after his capture. A farming town now, Halmyros was once a name that appeared in the treaties of empires.

The land around Almyros rewards slowing down. Just two kilometers from town lies the Kouri forest, 108 hectares of flat lowland oak woodland threaded with footpaths, even served by a miniature train that trundles over little bridges through the trees. The marshes nearby draw migratory birds, mute swans, spoonbills, glossy ibises, and herons among them. South of town the wooded Othrys mountains rise, and high in them, seventeen kilometers out, stands the 12th-century Monastery of Panagia Xenia, with its wall paintings, treasuries, and library. In town, the Archaeological Museum gathers local finds spanning the Neolithic, Mycenaean, Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman ages, housed near the old Gymnasium, an elegant monumental schoolhouse from the dawn of the 20th century.

Modern Almyros took its present municipal shape in the 2011 reforms, absorbing the communities of Anavra, Pteleos, and Sourpi into one large unit sprawling across more than 900 square kilometers. Three main churches anchor the town, Agios Dimitrios, Agios Nikolaos, and the Evangelistria, and several sandy beaches line the municipality's share of coast. Set 25 km southwest of Volos, with the great A1 motorway between Athens and Thessaloniki running just to the east, Almyros is well connected yet unhurried. It is a place that knows what it is: a working agricultural and commercial center, increasingly a destination in its own right, living quietly on ground that has fed and sheltered people, and tempted invaders, for the better part of three thousand years.