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 begins.
Four marinas share the coast, and each has a different use. Flisvos at Palaio Faliro takes the largest hulls in Attica. Alimos, at Kalamaki, is the biggest marina in the country, and most of the Aegean’s chartered yachts set out from it. Glyfada and Vouliagmeni are smaller and 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 centre, with the shops, the restaurants and the traffic. Vouliagmeni is the quiet money: a pine-covered peninsula with a bay on each side, and the swimming that Athenians drive out of the city for. South of it, Varkiza and Lagonissi run into a looser, saltier coast. At the end, the road stops at a headland with a temple on it.
The largest change here in 50 years is under way at Ellinikon. The old airport there is being rebuilt as a park, a marina and a tower that will be the tallest building in Greece. It will change what this coast is, but it has not changed it yet. For now the counsel is plain. If the trip is about the water, stay out here rather than in the city. Take the coast road rather than the motorway. 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 site of the old Asteria beach club. Vourekas, Dekavalas and Georgiadis designed that modernist complex in the 1950s, and its bungalows and villas were kept and rebuilt rather than cleared. A6A, AUDO and K-Studio handled the architecture and Muza Lab the interiors, and the hotel was completed in 2023. It is the newest address on this coast, and it carries its own history.
Astir Marina
Astir Marina at Vouliagmeni has 59 berths for yachts of up to 60 metres, and one berth for a hull of 130 metres and above. It has a touch-and-go helipad on site, security around the clock and an operating standard drawn up with the port authority of Monaco. It lies 22 kilometres from the airport, the shortest line from a landing to a departure by sea.
The course
Glyfada Golf Club opened in 1962 to a design by Donald Harradine and is still largely his: parkland cut through native pine, 1.5 kilometres from the sea, with Hymettus to the north-east. Robert Trent Jones reworked it in 1978, before the World Cup came, adding irrigation and turning the creek into a ravine. It lies 12 kilometres from the centre of Athens. Take the first tee times of the morning.
Athena Sounias
On a low hill 300 metres north-east of the temple on the headland stood a second sanctuary, the temple of Athena Sounias, built around 470 BC. Its plan has no parallel in Greek architecture: it had colonnades on the south and east sides only, an oddity Vitruvius thought worth recording. It was pulled down in the 1st century AD, and its columns were carried to Athens for a temple in the Agora. Almost nobody walks up to it.
Cape Sounio
Cape Sounio, the Grecotel resort beside the archaeological site, lies along a coast of pine. Its 139 bungalows, suites and villas rise in tiers like an amphitheatre so the temple stays in view, and its eight restaurants and bars draw on kitchen gardens in the grounds. Lavrio port is 10 minutes away, so this is the room to keep when the crossing to the Cyclades starts the next morning.
The thalasso
Divani Apollon Palace at Vouliagmeni has a thalassotherapy centre, for treatments with sea water, of 3,500 square metres, the only one in Athens. It is built around a seawater pool of 270 square metres, held at 32°C, with 16 jets along its length. Treatments run from a 15-minute jet shower to a 2-hour ritual. It is open until 10pm on weekdays and 7pm at weekends, and the late slot is the quiet one.
The farm
The Margi has its own land at Kalyvia Thorikou, inland from the coast: 10 acres of vegetables, olives and vines, with chickens, goats and horses, taken on in 2014 to supply the hotel’s kitchens. Guests dine out there among the rows by arrangement, and group tables are by reservation only. Most of what this coast serves is imported, and the farm shows where this food comes from.
Ithaki
Ithaki, at 28 Apollonos above Vouliagmeni bay, is a fish restaurant whose outdoor tables stand well apart from one another, among flowers and trees, with the water below. The kitchen cooks fresh fish and seafood, drawing on tradition and on later international trends alike. The terrace is the table to have: ask for it when you book, 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 served fish through war and occupation ever since, and it holds the bay view that the newer restaurants along this coast were built to imitate.
Apollo Zoster
An Archaic marble temple stands within the grounds of Astir Beach at Vouliagmeni. It has a rectangular sekos, or inner shrine, and was founded in the 6th century BC. Children from the local orphanage found it in the sand, and Kourouniotes and Pittidis excavated it in 1926 and 1927. Inscriptions name it for Apollo Zoster, after the belt Leto is said to have loosened here. Kostas Voutsinas laid out the beach around it in 1959.
Anchorage Notes
Glyfada Marina
Glyfada Marina is the oldest on this coast, and it is municipal: the Municipality of Glyfada runs it through its Marina Management and Control Office, not through a marina company. Its four small basins hold 146, 94, 253 and 259 berths, it takes hulls up to 35 metres, and it has few services. A place is arranged in person at the office, between 8.15am and 2pm, with the vessel’s papers.
Astir Marina
Astir Marina is on the Lemos peninsula at Vouliagmeni, at 77 Apollonos, and the municipality names it the home port for yachts on this stretch of coast. It has a control tower, fuel and recycling on the quay, and a viewing terrace over the bay. A place is taken by berthing application through the marina, whose office is open daily, and the Four Seasons and Astir Beach are a walk from the stern.
Agios Kosmas
Agios Kosmas, at Elliniko, has been held by Lamda Development since July 2021. It has 337 berths for hulls from 10 to 60 metres, and its operator is rebuilding it to take larger ones still. It is the newest water on this coast, and the only harbour here whose shape is still changing from one season to the next.
Varkiza
The harbour at Varkiza is a fishing shelter, built in 1980 by the community of Vari, with 116 places for boats up to 20 metres and 70 working fishermen who go out at night. The municipality lists it among its ports, alongside Astir. It is no place for a large hull, but a tender can come in to the square at the head of the harbour, which is the centre of life in Varkiza.
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, and from a yacht lying off, by tender. There is nothing ashore at all, which is their whole appeal and the reason to keep an afternoon for them.
Sounion
Sounion is where the coast of Attica, the region around Athens, ends. The Temple of Poseidon on the cape has been the first Athenian landmark seen from the sea for 2,500 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 arriving by water is the better way to arrive.
Mythology
Poseidon
At Cape Sounion, Poseidon’s sacred ground covered the headland above the sea. The marble temple that still stands there was built around 444 to 440 BC on top of an earlier limestone temple.
The Temple of Poseidon at Sounion
The Temple of Poseidon stands on the highest point of the walled cape at Sounion. Its surviving marble building was raised around 444 to 440 BC over an earlier limestone temple, and inscriptions found there identify the sanctuary as Poseidon’s.