Pavlopetri is the name given to a sunken Greek town off the southern Peloponnese. An Anglo-Greek team of archaeologists have dated the remains to between 2800 and 1200 BC and as such are referring to it as the oldest (known) submerged city in the world. This dating places it before the time of Plato and so it did not take long for commentators to suggest that it was possibly the inspiration behind aspects of Plato’s Atlantis narrative. However, the number of known submerged cities  in the Mediterranean has been numbered at around 200. Everytime one is discovered there is usually an attempt made to associate it with Atlantis, which fades when it is realised that it fails to match many of the other descriptive identifiers noted by Plato.

An October 2011 BBC documentary City Beneath the Waves Pavlopetri revealed that the port city was more extensive than originally thought and that it traded with other Aegean states particularly the Minoans on Crete.