The city occupied the flank of a hill in Achaea Phthiotis, about twenty stadia inland from the Maliac Gulf, in the country the ancients called Pelasgia. Strabo, the great Greek geographer, described it as well watered and good for vines an ordinary blessing of fertility in a landscape better known for war. The location was no accident. A settlement that hangs from a slope can see who is coming. It commands the approaches without surrendering the high ground. To the Romans, the place lent its name to a hero: because Larissa lay within the legendary domain of Achilles, some poets gave him the surname Larissaeus, though scholars suspect the epithet simply meant "Thessalian" in a general sense.

For a town of modest size, Larissa Cremaste saw an outsized share of history's heavy traffic. In 302 BC, Demetrius Poliorcetes the Macedonian called "the Besieger" seized it during his war with Cassander, in the chaotic generation after Alexander when his former generals carved up the world. A century later, Rome arrived. The Roman legate Lucius Apustius took the town in 200 BC during the first war between the Roman Republic and Philip V of Macedon. And in 171 BC, in the final reckoning with Perseus of Macedon, it fell to Roman hands once more. Three captures, three different conquerors each marking the slow eclipse of independent Greek power before the rising shadow of Rome.

The ruins are most striking on the western side, where several courses of ancient masonry still stand conspicuous against the hill. The only detailed survey was made in 1912 by the German scholar Friedrich Stahlin, who mapped a substantial circuit of walls enclosing both the hilltop acropolis and a large stretch of the eastern slope. He found two main gates in the lower fortifications and a postern, a small hidden door, set into the acropolis wall. Much of his plan was reconstruction; whole stretches of the defenses had already vanished by the time he climbed the hill. Curiously, Stahlin noted nothing predating the Classical period, and most of what still stood was medieval. The fortress, it seems, kept being rebuilt because the hill kept being worth holding.

A city above the plain still needed a way to the sea. When crews widened the national highway between Lamia and Larisa in the early 2000s, rescue excavations turned up the answer at the hill of Agios Konstantinos, four kilometers south. There, beside the shore of the Maliac Gulf, archaeologists uncovered an urban harbor settlement almost certainly the port of ancient Larissa. Tucked into a protected bay of the Euboean Gulf, it would have been a vital node in the regional trade network, a lower town spread along the beach behind a fortification wall that climbed to a small acropolis on the adjacent hilltop. Dated to the Classical period, it was abandoned around the fourth century BC, leaving the hanging city above to face the coming empires on its own.