Athens Riviera
Overview
The Athens Riviera is the reason a guest can land at a European capital in the morning and be at sea by the afternoon. It is the coast the city turns to face, and it is where a Greek charter actually begins.
Four marinas hold the coast between them, and they are not interchangeable. Flisvos at Palaio Faliro takes the largest hulls in Attica. Alimos, at Kalamaki, is the biggest marina in the country and the harbour from which most of the Aegean's chartered yachts set out. Glyfada and Vouliagmeni are smaller, quieter and harder to get into. A yacht provisioned here on a Saturday is in the Saronic the same evening.
Ashore, the coast changes character every few kilometres. Glyfada is the commercial heart, with the shops and the tables and the traffic. Vouliagmeni is the quiet money: a pine-covered peninsula with a bay on either side, and the swimming Athenians will drive out of the city for. South of it Varkiza and Lagonissi run into a looser, saltier coast, and at the end the road simply stops at a headland with a temple on it.
The largest change here in fifty years is under way at Ellinikon, where the old airport is being rebuilt as a park, a marina and a tower that will be the tallest building in Greece. It will alter what this coast is; it has not altered it yet. For now the counsel is plain: stay out here rather than in the city if the trip is about the water, take the coast road rather than the motorway, and keep an evening for the far end of it, which empties as the light goes.
House Notes
The address
One&Only Aesthesis stands at 110 Poseidonos in Glyfada, on the ground of the old Asteria beach club — the modernist complex drawn in the 1950s by Vourekas, Dekavalas and Georgiadis, whose bungalows and villas were kept and rebuilt rather than cleared. A6A, AUDO and K-Studio handled the architecture, Muza Lab the interiors; completed in 2023. The newest address on this coast, and the one that carries its own history.
Astir Marina
Astir Marina at Vouliagmeni holds 59 berths for yachts to 60 metres, and one berth for a hull of 130 metres and above. There is a touch-and-go helipad on site, security around the clock, and an operating standard drawn up with Monaco’s port authority. It lies 22 km from the airport, which is the shortest line between a landing and a departure under way.
The course
Glyfada Golf Club opened in 1962 to a Donald Harradine design and remains largely his — parkland cut through native pine, 1.5 km from the sea, with Hymettus standing to the northeast. Robert Trent Jones reworked it in 1978 before the World Cup came, laying in irrigation and flattening the creek into a ravine. It sits 12 km from the centre of Athens. Take the first tee times of the morning.
Athena Sounias
On a low hill 300 metres northeast of the headland’s temple stood a second sanctuary — the temple of Athena Sounias, raised around 470 BC. Its plan has no parallel in Greek architecture: colonnades on the south and east sides only, a peculiarity Vitruvius thought worth recording. It was pulled down in the 1st century AD and its columns carried to Athens for a temple in the Agora. Almost nobody walks up to it.
Cape Sounio
Cape Sounio, Grecotel’s resort beside the archaeological site, is set along a pine-clad coastline — 139 bungalows, suites and villas arranged amphitheatrically so the temple stays in view, and eight restaurants and bars supplied from kitchen gardens on the grounds. Lavrio port is ten minutes away, which makes this the room to hold when the crossing to the Cyclades begins the next morning.
The thalasso
Divani Apollon Palace at Vouliagmeni keeps a 3,500 sq m thalassotherapy centre, the only one in Athens, built around a 270 sq m seawater pool held at 32°C with 16 jets set along its length. The treatment book runs from a 15-minute jet shower to a two-hour ritual. Open until 22:00 on weekdays and 19:00 at weekends — the late slot is the quiet one.
The farm
The Margi keeps its own land at Kalyvia Thorikou, inland from the coast — ten acres of vegetables, olives and vines, with chickens, goats and horses, taken on in 2014 to supply the hotel’s kitchens. Guests are dined out there among the rows, by arrangement, and group tables by reservation only. On a coast that imports most of what it serves, it is the answer to where the food came from.
Ithaki
Ithaki sits at 28 Apollonos above Vouliagmeni bay — a fish house whose outdoor tables are set entirely apart from one another, rich in flowers and trees, with the water below. The kitchen works fresh fish and seafood, drawing on the tradition and on later international trends alike. The terrace is the table, and it is asked for when the booking is made, never on arrival.
Labros
Labros opened at Poseidonos 20 in 1889, when Vouliagmeni was a long ride out of Athens and George I was on the throne. The marble slab recording it is still in place. It has been a fish restaurant through war and occupation since, and it holds the bay view that the newer rooms along this coast were built to imitate.
Apollo Zoster
An Archaic temple stands within the grounds of Astir Beach at Vouliagmeni — marble, a rectangular sekos, founded in the 6th century BC and excavated by Kourouniotes and Pittidis across 1926 and 1927 after children from the local orphanage turned it up in the sand. Inscriptions name it for Apollo Zoster, after the belt Leto is said to have loosened here. The beach around it was laid out in 1959 by Kostas Voutsinas.
Anchorage Notes
Glyfada Marina
Glyfada Marina is the oldest on this coast, and it is municipal: four small basins — 146 berths, 94, 253 and 259 — administered by the Municipality of Glyfada through its Marina Management and Control Office rather than by a marina company. It takes hulls to 35 metres, and the services are few. A place is arranged in person at the office, between 08:15 and 14:00, with the vessel’s papers.
Astir Marina
Astir Marina sits on the Lemos peninsula at Vouliagmeni, 77 Apollonos, and the municipality names it the home port for yachts on this stretch of coast. There is a control tower, fuel and recycling on the quay, and a belvedere over the bay. A place is taken by berthing application through the marina, whose office keeps hours daily; the Four Seasons and Astir Beach lie a walk from the stern.
Agios Kosmas
Agios Kosmas at Elliniko has been held by Lamda Development since July 2021 — 337 berths, taking hulls from ten to sixty metres, and under reconstruction by its operator to take larger ones still. It is the newest water on this coast and the only harbour here whose shape is still changing; a yacht that lies at Elliniko today lies in a marina that will not be the same one next season.
Varkiza
The harbour at Varkiza is a fishing shelter, not a marina — built in 1980 by the community of Vari, with 116 places for boats to twenty metres and seventy working fishermen who go out at night. The municipality lists it among its ports, alongside Astir. A large hull has no business here. A tender does: the square at the head of the harbour is where Varkiza actually lives.
The Limanakia
Between Vouliagmeni and Varkiza the coast breaks into the Limanakia — the “small ports”, a run of little coves with blue-green water, popular with Athenians and with scuba divers. From the road they are reached only down steep slopes; from a yacht lying off, by tender. There is nothing ashore at all, which is the whole of their appeal, and the reason to keep an afternoon for them.
Sounion
Sounion is where the Attic coast ends. The Temple of Poseidon on the cape has been the first Athenian landmark seen from the sea for two and a half thousand years, and served as a watchtower over the passage to Piraeus; the headland falls to two small coves, and an ancient port lay beneath the sanctuary. It is the one place on this coast where the arrival by water is the better arrival.