Hurst Publishers

For decades, Athens capped how tall its buildings could go, all to keep one view clear: the Parthenon. The tower in this photo is the first the city has let rise past that limit, and only because it stands six miles out on the coast. It's called the Riviera Tower, and it's going up on the old Athens airport. The airport closed in 2001. After that the land just sat there, fenced off and rotting, with a few abandoned planes still parked on the runway, for almost twenty years. Greece couldn't agree on what to build, and then the country went broke in the 2008 crash. In 2014, with the government selling off whatever it could to pay its debts, a Greek property company grabbed a 99-year lease on the land for 915 million euros, a little over a billion dollars. Finished, it will reach 200 meters across 50 floors, the tallest building Greece has ever put up, roughly double the old record, an office block from 1971. Right in the center, buildings couldn't pass about 27 meters, roughly nine storeys. This one clears that old limit many times over, and it can only do that because it sits outside the historic core, on coastal land where the cap was lifted in 2022. The apartments tell you who it's really for. All 173 of them sold before the building was even finished, for more than 600 million euros between them, plenty of it to buyers from outside Greece. And the tower is only the centerpiece. Around it, a whole new neighborhood is being built, where everything you need sits within a fifteen-minute walk, wrapped around a park about the size of Monaco. The full plan runs close to 8 billion euros, the biggest project of its kind in Europe. It was supposed to open by early 2026. The opening has since slipped to the summer of 2027. Stand on the Acropolis, where the Parthenon has held the skyline for almost 2,500 years, and the new tower is there if you look for it, a thin pale shape far out toward the sea, six miles past the edge of the old city.