At the southern entrance of the valley lie the remains of the Ottoman-era Hasan Baba Tekke, a 14-15th century mosque built about the tomb of a dervish saint.

Then, following some centuries of Roman peace, the pass was penetrated again during the first Gothic War (376–382) when, in the words of the poet Claudian, "Thessaly grieved because the Vale of Tempe was no help, while the Goths laughed at Mount Oeta's conquered crags".

[8] By the time of the Battle of Tempe Gorge in 1941, it had hardly improved and later, as the Greek National Road 1, had still the reputation of being narrow and dangerous, with one particular accident causing the deaths of 21 schoolchildren in April 2003.

Originally built as single-tracked in the 1910s, it was closed on 27 November 2003 and the following day trains were routed through the new double-tracked line, featuring two long tunnels that allow speeds of up to 160 km/h.

In his illustrated atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1590), Abraham Ortelius pictured the gorge as "The Paradise of Tempe at the foot of Mount Olympus", inhabited by a pious and happy people.

[17] A later historian embroidered on his bare statement of fact with the reflection that "Pompey passed on through the Vale of Tempe to the sea, regardless of the beauty and splendour that surrounded him".

[20] In reality, William Smith sets such accounts straight in his Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), commenting that the vale's "scenery is distinguished rather by savage grandeur than by the sylvan beauty which [some authors] attribute to it…None of these writers appear to have drawn their pictures from actual observation".

In corroboration he cites Edward Dodwell's account of A Classical and Topographical Tour through Greece (1819) and the accompanying engravings based on the drawings he made on his journey.

[21] In the course of his passage through the gorge, Dodwell notes, "the traveller beholds on either side a stupendous wall of mighty precipices rising in prodigious grandeur, shattered into deformities and sprinkled with a wild profusion of trees and aromatic shrubs.