The Ellinikon Park Athens design is set to deliver one of Europe’s most climate-engineered public spaces: a 400-acre coastal park built from a former airport site, planned to open to the public next year, with further works scheduled for 2030. According to Sasaki, the park (which they describe as spanning 243 hectares) is the centrepiece of a mixed-use district intended to create a new centre of gravity for Athens.
The scale of the ambition is hard to overstate. 30,000 trees and 3 million smaller plants will cover the site, drawing on more than 520 species of flora, around three-quarters of which will be native or suitably adapted to the Mediterranean climate. Planners have designed each connecting space to maximise thermoregulation, with a stated goal of keeping air temperature 4°C cooler than surrounding asphalt and concrete areas. Simulations covering air circulation, average wind direction, evaporation speed, and Computational Fluid Dynamics shaped every path and planting decision.
Why Athens needs Ellinikon Park more than most cities
The context matters. Athens holds a World Meteorological Organization record for the highest temperature ever recorded in Europe: 48.0°C. The city was the first in Europe to appoint a chief heat officer to manage severe heat waves. It is home to double the population of the next nine largest Greek cities combined, yet greenery and space for it have been severely lacking.
In 2024, under the mayorship of Haris Doukas, Athens began planting its first micro-forest, and greening projects totalling 5,000 trees were carried out across six neighbourhoods and on the Acropolis. Those efforts, welcome as they were, operate at a different scale to what Ellinikon represents.
Rest areas within the park are being designed with a shading ratio of more than 60%. Running water channels, misting systems, and low-consumption basins will help maintain cooler, moister air. Smart irrigation is central to the approach: the park will include onsite water treatment facilities to supply non-potable water for plants, alongside a rainwater catchment system to feed the water features.
Ellinikon Park Athens design reuses airport rubble and local stone
The materials strategy is worth noting. Designers were given first access to leftover materials from the demolished airport infrastructure, and Euronews reports they made use of hundreds of tons of concrete slabs and rubble. For the finer elements, the project draws on Kavala marble, white Dionysos-Penteli marble, Karystos slate, and Mandras sandstone, allowing the built features to sit in keeping with the natural ones.
Low rainfall combined with scorching summers makes plant selection a genuine engineering challenge rather than an aesthetic one. The reliance on native and adapted species is not a styling choice, plants unsuited to this climate would not survive long enough to provide the cooling effect the whole design depends on.
A district, not just a park
The Ellinikon is being developed as part of a broader mixed-use district, and two other projects attached to the site illustrate how much is being staked on this coastal strip. According to Designboom, the Riviera Tower, designed by Foster + Partners, is already LEED Gold pre-certified and targets completion in 2026, at which point it would become Greece’s first skyscraper. On the coastal front of the same development, a Mandarin Oriental property, including a five-star hotel, is set to open in summer 2027.
Those additions bring their own pressures. A luxury hotel and a landmark tower can raise property values and intensify demand in ways that do not always benefit the residents a cooling park is meant to serve. Whether the public amenity keeps pace with the private development is the open question the project’s backers will need to answer as the site takes shape.
For now, the park’s stated opening remains planned for next year, with the Riviera Tower targeting 2026 and the Mandarin Oriental following in summer 2027, three consecutive years of major openings on a site that, not long ago, was a decommissioned runway.
