Athens offers the transport possibilities a big metropolis can provide.
By Air
Easily accessible from virtually any point of departure, Athens is serviced at the present time by the brand new airport "Eleftherios Venizelos", at the area of Spata. It is built 27 km North-East of Athens, in an area of 16.5 million square meters and with an annual capacity to serve up to 50 million passengers. This superb airport is Europe's finest and most modern aviation gateway, especially designed to cater to the 21st century's traveller needs. It is an exemplary airport in terms of safety, equipment and operational excellence, providing unrivalled levels of customer care and user-friendliness.
The airport in numbers
16 square kilometres
2 independent runways
44 transfer flight desks
24 passenger boarding bridges
2 tomographs
14.000 employees
More than 35 retail outlets
16 million passengers annual capacity
144 check-in counters
81 aircraft stands
11 baggage reclaim belts
8 X-ray baggage detectors
6.800 sq.m. Shopping Mall
10 restaurants/cafes
Click here to download the daily scheduled flights from main cities to Athens.
You can see how well the capital of Greece is connected with the rest of the world
By Train
The main standard gauge railway network of Greece currently provides links between Athens and:
Northern Greece and thus with the rest of Europe through former Yugoslavia and Bulgaria
The port of Patras and hence with Italy and Western Europe.
The Middle East, via the port of Volos.
This network has been included in the main European high-speed train network and is rapidly being renovated. Approximately $2 billion are to be spent on modernisation.
By Boat
There are daily ferryboat connections from Italy (Ancona, Bari and Brindisi, Venice and Trieste) to Patras -the second important port of entry, which is approximately 180 km from Athens. Passengers and vehicles of all types - including coaches - are served by an entire fleet of car ferries. During the summer, more than 250.000 passengers, 1,000 buses, 50,000 cars and 15,000 trucks are handled monthly by the Patras harbour whereas 40 boats sail into the harbour every week.
The Port of Piraeus
Piraeus has been the port of Athens since antiquity. It is the largest port of Greece and one of the most important in the Mediterranean Sea. From the harbour of Piraeus, which is a thirty-minute ride by taxi or subway from Athens, ferryboats run continuously to and from all the Greek islands. In 1998, a total of 22,000 boats sailed into the harbour, while more than 8,000,000 passengers were handled for the same time period.
By Road
Athens can be reached by road via former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania and Turkey.
One of the most important modern infrastructure projects for international links, in Northern Greece, Egnatia Road (Egnatia Odos), with an overall length 687 Km, links with all major urban centres (Ioannina, Metsovo, Grevena, Kozani, Veria, Thessaloniki, Kavala, Xanthi, Komotini and Alexandroupoli - of which 5 ports and 6 airports), and 9 perpendicular road axes confirm that Greece is indeed the East and West Gateway in Southern Europe. This huge project, establishes a reliable communication path to and from S.E. Europe, connects the Baltic with the Mediterranean Sea and its ports, provides direct access to adjacent countries and opens up communication channels via the 9 vertical road axes to the North, connecting Greece with the internal areas of its bordering countries.
Moreover, the development of the existing 800 Km long Patra-Athens-Thessaloniki-Evzoni road axis, which links the country's three largest cities with the border post of Evzoni and thus with former Yugoslavia is also an improvement works programme of great importance.
