Out & About

The Mountains of Attica & Athens

The Mountains of Attica and Athens are not your usual idea of mountains, here they have mountain ranges with ridges, peaks, valleys, crevices and cliffs, all included in one name.

It is mainly to do with size and the shear quantity of mountains that they have in Greece, naming each peak and valley becomes cumbersome, so they take the base line area of a mountain range and call it one name, all the features in this area of upraised mountainous region belongs to this designation, the valleys in its area that are occupied by villages give their name to the community but not the features in the mountain range.

So, Mount Ymittos is a large mountain range with many villages around it and in it, the side that faces Athens centre has the communication and broadcast arrays along its ridge, but the other sections are vastly different

Mount Parnitha is even larger and most of it is protected forest

Mount Gerania only has a small part that extends into Attica that runs west up to Corinth

Mount Aegaleo is a small mountain range inside of Attica that goes the port of Piraeus, it has many different aspects from industrial in one small part to preserved areas of natural beauty

Mount Penteli is a beautiful small range with many features and fantastic areas to visit

So what can you do with Mountains?

Rock-climbing, Abseiling, there are caves, when they go down to the sea there are cliffs and beaches

You can Paraglide above them

Walk all over them

Bike through them

If there are valleys, ravines, rivers or lakes you can explore

Where there are people there are villages, towns and by the sea there are ports

Plenty of places to stay

They have living, working monasteries, ruined monasteries, remains of past civilisations, abandoned temples and lots more to discover

They are all different and have their own interesting features that are more than just the statistics to do with their height, length

Yimittos and Parintha are the two that bracket Athens