A5 motorway (Greece)

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Greek. (December 2023) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Greek Wikipedia article at [[:el:Ιόνια Οδός]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|el|Ιόνια Οδός}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

A5 motorway
Αυτοκινητόδρομος 5
Ionia Odos / Ιονία Οδός
Route information
Part of E55 E951
Ionia Odos
Length	196 km (122 mi)
North end	Ioannina
South end	Patras
Location
Country	Greece
Regions	Epirus, West Greece, Peloponnese
Major cities	Ioannina, Arta, Agrinio, Patras
Highway system
Highways in Greece Motorways National Roads

The A5 motorway, also known as the Ionia Odos (Greek: Ιόνια Οδός),^[1][2] is a controlled-access highway in western Greece, which starts at Ioannina and it follows the western coastline of mainland Greece down to the Gulf of Corinth. At Rio, it crosses the gulf via the Rio–Antirrio bridge and is connected with the A8 at an interchange near Patras. The future, currently under construction, Patras - Pyrgos motorway is typically part of the A5 motorway and will eventually extend to Tsakona near Kalamata.

In August 2017, the last section under construction (Perdika-Ioannina) was completed and delivered to traffic by the Greek Minister of Infrastructure, Transport and Network, making Ionia Odos a fully operational motorway.^[3] It is the second major north–south road connection after the A1 motorway and is also part of the trans-balkanic Adriatic–Ionian motorway and the European routes E55 and E951.

The Ionia Odos motorway was one of the most challenging construction projects in Greece, as it spans a big part of Western Greece and because of its location on the foothills of the Pindus mountain range. After its completion in August 2017, it reduced travel times between Antirrio and Ioannina to 1 hour and 40 minutes, down from 3 hours and 30 minutes and will provide a boost to the economy of the regions it spans (Western Greece and Epirus).