Palaio Faliro

Phaleron (Φάληρον) was a deme of ancient Athens and the city's harbour until Themistocles made Piraeus the main port in the fifth century BC. The name Old Faliro dates only from the later nineteenth century, after Neo Faliro had grown up on the Piraeus side of the bay, and until about 1920 the place was a small village of farmers and shepherds, with a few fishermen.

The tram, nevertheless, came well before the suburb did. A horse-drawn line linked the village with Athens in 1883 and steam trams followed in 1890, wealthy families built seaside mansions here between about 1910 and 1915, and the settlement became a community in 1925 and a municipality in 1942. In August 1926 a seaplane airport opened on the Delta, with a first international route from Brindisi to Faliro and Istanbul.

Growth came after the war, at first as a place of summer houses, and the population rose from 12 894 in 1951 to 53 273 in 1981, the decades in which most of today's blocks of flats very likely went up. Some took the place of older houses through antiparochi (an owner trading a house and its plot to a builder for flats in the new block). The actor Stefania Goulioti, who grew up here, recalled in 2013 that the neoclassical houses of her street, some already abandoned in her childhood, had all become blocks of flats, as had many Asia Minor mansions whose owners could not keep them up. Many Greeks from Istanbul also settled here, especially after 1974.

The coast was redeveloped for the 2004 Olympic Games, when the tram also returned to Poseidonos Avenue, and it now has a promenade, several sports venues, a marina and the Naval Tradition Park. Flisvos marina has 310 berths (more than half of them, LAMDA Development says, for yachts over 30 metres) and a complex of shops and restaurants ashore, with Flisvos Park beside it.

At the Trocadero quay, in the Naval Tradition Park, lies the Averof, an armoured cruiser (known in Greece as a battleship) launched at Livorno in 1910 and, it seems, the only ship of her type still in existence. She led the Greek fleet at Elli in 1912 and Lemnos in 1913, was decommissioned in 1952 and, after almost three decades berthed at Poros, was towed here in 1984 to become a museum. The park also keeps Olympias (a reconstruction of an ancient Athenian trireme, built in Piraeus between 1985 and 1987) in a dry dock.

On Poseidonos Avenue, the Kouloura mansion of 1897 to 1900, given to the Benaki Museum by Vera Kouloura as her husband had wished, has housed its Toy Museum since October 2017.

Edem, at the Alimos end of the coast, is a popular place to swim, within limits that are probably worth knowing. The Ministry of Health's circular for 2026, issued in late July, lists the waters that do not meet the required standard and, as its decision of August 2025 did, bans bathing at one end of the Edem shore (by the Edem restaurant) and for 100 metres either side of the mouth of the Pikrodafni stream, the boundary with Alimos. The same list also takes in the whole shore from Mikrolimano in Piraeus as far as Xirotagaro, by the Naval Tradition Park at the edge of the marina.

Just over the boundary in Kallithea, on the site of the old Faliro racecourse (1925 to 2003), stands the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, designed by Renzo Piano and given to the Greek state in 2017, a year after its completion. It houses the National Library of Greece and the Greek National Opera in a large landscaped park, with a canal of sea water along its main axis.

In front of it lies the Delta, where the Attica Region is to build the Aenaon metropolitan park between the Peace and Friendship Stadium and the old taekwondo hall. Powergame reported in September 2026 that the contract had been signed, and the regional governor, Nikos Hardalias, has put completion in the second half of 2029 (To Vima, August 2026), later than the end-of-2028 target first announced.

Two tram lines, both run by STASY, serve the municipality. Line 7 runs between Piraeus and Voula and here keeps to Poseidonos Avenue, with stops that include Trocadero, Parko Flisvou, Flisvos, Batis and Edem. Line 6, for its part, brings you down from Syntagma by way of Fix and Neos Kosmos to Amfitheas, Panaghitsa and Edem, and ends at Pikrodafni, where STASY's timetable has passengers change between the two lines.

There is, nevertheless, no metro station in Palaio Faliro itself, as Faliro station on line 1 is in Neo Faliro, in Piraeus. Buses fill the gap (OASA's 126 runs through Amfithea to Syngrou-Fix on line 2, the 550 passes the same station on its way to Kifisia, and the X96 to the airport stops at Flisvos and Edem). In 2023 the mayor, Giannis Fostiropoulos, said that studies for a metro extension to Palaio Faliro were needed.

By road, Andrea Syngrou Avenue leads to central Athens and Poseidonos Avenue to Piraeus and the southern suburbs, so the beach lies across a main road from the town, in an area that the then regional governor, Giorgos Patoulis, called congested and dangerous when a footbridge at Afroditis Street (by the Flisvos marina), long asked for by residents, opened in 2021.

The municipality is made up of quarters (Amfithea, Batis, Edem, Panagitsa, Flisvos, Trocadero, Palmyra, Pikrodafni, Agia Varvara, Kopsacheila and the Delta), of which Panagitsa and Amfithea lie back from the coast, on the route of line 6. Amfitheas Avenue, which the A2 bus follows from central Athens towards Voula, runs through Amfithea, and in October 2023 the municipality began rebuilding the pavements along a long stretch of it, widening them on the Glyfada-bound side and adding new planting.

Life here, notwithstanding the density (some 14 000 people to the square kilometre), still seems to turn largely on the sea, and AO Palaiou Faliro, founded in 1926, has swimming and water polo teams as well as basketball and volleyball. As for the climate, it is warm and fairly dry, with mild winters and very hot summers.

For a buyer, most homes are likely to be flats in blocks of different ages. The drawbacks are evident enough (the density, the main road, the lack of a metro station and a bay where bathing is banned from Piraeus as far as the marina and at points near Edem), although they may weigh less with those who come for the sea.