Nineteenth-century British scholar William Mure who visited the site wrote that “there is certainly no remnant of the architectural splendour of Greece more calculated to fascinate the imagination than this temple; whether by its own size and beauty, by the contrast it offers to the wild desolation of the surrounding scenery, or the extent and variety of the prospect from its site.”[10] A spring rises about ten minutes walk southwest of the temple, and soon afterwards loses itself in the ground, as Pausanias has described.

North of the temple was the highest summit of the mountain, which one reaches in ten minutes' time by a broad road constructed by the Greeks.

Several curious cults were preserved near Phigalia, including that of the fishtailed goddess Eurynome and the Black Demeter with a horse's head, whose image was renewed by Onatas.

Though its existing ruins and the description of Pausanias, who describes it as situated upon a lofty and precipitous hill, the greater part of the walls being built upon the rocks, show it to have been a place of considerable strength and importance, no autonomous coins of Phigalia are known.

Nothing remained above ground of the temples of Artemis or Dionysus and the numerous statues and other works of art which existed at the time of Pausanias' visit, about AD 170.

On the summit of the acropolis within the walls are the remains of a detached citadel, 80 yards (73 m) in length, containing a round tower at the extremity, measuring 18 feet (5.5 m) in the interior diameter.

On the slope of the mountain lay the gymnasium and the temple of Dionysus Acratophorus; and on the ground below, where the village of upper Figaleia stands, was the agora, adorned with a statue of the pancratiast Arrachion, who lost his life in the Olympic Games, and with the sepulchre of the Oresthasians, who perished to restore the Phigaleans to their native city.

In the same neighbourhood, and at the distance of 12 stadia from the city, were some warm baths, traces of which are visible at the village of Tragói, but the waters have long ceased to flow.