On 8 August 2025 the Municipality of Alimos issued the pre-approval of the building permit for the redevelopment of Alimos Marina — the consent that stands immediately before the permit itself. It is municipal paperwork, and it is also the moment a rebuild worth approximately €100 million stopped being a drawing. The harbour it concerns, on the Athens Riviera at Alimos, is one of the largest in the Mediterranean and the largest in Greece, and from the autumn of 2026 it will be a building site as much as a marina.

What the municipality approved is the land half of the project: 18,500 square metres of buildings across a shore zone of 210,000 square metres, given over to commercial, tourist, cultural and sporting use. The pre-approval is not the permit. It is the step that confirms the scheme may be built as drawn, after which the permit follows on the detail. That permit was issued on 11 May 2026, and REDS, the property company of the Ellaktor group, has the works beginning in the autumn of the same year.

The sequence behind it is longer than the announcement suggests. The joint ministerial decision setting the zoning and the environmental terms was issued in June 2024; the final studies went to the competent authorities in October of the same year. Some 19 months then passed between those studies and the permit that answered them.

The water as it stands

The harbour that will be worked on is already substantial. Alimos holds 1,100 permanent berths across a sea area of 428,000 square metres, with jetties running to 1,170 metres and a maximum depth of 6.5 metres. Of those berths, 50 are suitable for yachts over 25 metres. Behind the water lies a dry dock area of 60,000 square metres — the servicing ground that decides, more than any promenade, whether a fleet keeps its base in one place.

For the house’s clients this is the quay Athens actually uses. It is where a chartered yacht is boarded on the first afternoon of a Cyclades passage, and where it is returned ten days later. What happens to it is not a matter of scenery.

Fewer berths, and larger ones

The rebuilt harbour is drawn as 979 berths — fewer than it holds now, and arranged for vessels of up to 50 metres. That subtraction is the whole argument of the project. A marina that has served a charter fleet of moderate boats is being redrawn for larger ones, and the arithmetic of a basin is unforgiving: length is bought with numbers. A shore already at capacity through the season will hold rather less than it did, and hold it better.

Attica is doing this in more than one place at once. The coast that absorbs a boat displaced from Alimos is the same coast being rebuilt at Agios Kosmas. Where a vessel lies while both shores are worked is a narrower question than it was in 2024.

The land behind the quay

The scheme REDS has published treats the land as a continuation of the city rather than a service yard fenced off from it. The buildings are drawn low and broken into volumes, set among planting, with green roofs over the ground-floor structures so that what the town sees from above is not a run of flat sheeting. More than 800 parking spaces are added. The coastal bicycle path runs through the site and meets the marina at several points. Among the uses named are shops, offices, restaurants and boat rental offices, together with the Alimos Municipality Art Gallery and an information kiosk.

It is a familiar move on this coast — the working harbour reopened as a public front — and it carries the familiar risk with it. A marina judged on its cafés is not the same asset as a marina judged on its fuel dock.

What it is worth

The concession was awarded by the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund in 2020 and runs 40 years from 1 January 2021, with an option of 10 more. Against it, some €57.5 million goes to the state across the term — a one-off fee of €27.3 million, then a fixed annual sum and 16 per cent of the marina’s revenue each year. REDS holds a contract worth €48.3 million for the execution of the works.

The harbour is already the group’s earning asset rather than its promise: of the €18 million the property and hospitality division took in 2025, €13.8 million came from Alimos Marina, against €3.7 million the year before. In the first half of that year Ellaktor completed the buyout of the REDS minorities, making the developer a wholly owned subsidiary. The marina is now the centre of the group’s property case, and it is being rebuilt with that weight on it.

What it changes

For an owner or a charterer, the near term is the harder half. Works beginning in the autumn of 2026 mean building through the seasons in which the Saronic is most sought, on a shore with little slack, and a finished basin that will take fewer boats than the one it replaces. What arrives on the other side is a harbour cut for a different vessel — deeper in ambition than in water, and finally drawn for the sort of yacht that has had to lie elsewhere.

Whether it holds its discipline as a working port, once there is an art gallery on the quay, is the question the drawings cannot answer. Owners will decide it slowly, and by returning.

The house makes the introduction, for those who ask.