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Attiki areas and districts
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The tourist guide greek-tourism informs you about the restaurants, lodgings, hotels and businesses that from which you'll be satisfied and recommend Athens to all your friends enticing them to visit. We are choosing the best restaurants, lodgings, hotels and businesses bearing in mind these criteria as well as what the locals and the Internet visitors told us excluding our opinion for those hotels that we think the most of, and we recommend without doubt that you should visit them.
In Syntagma you should absolutely visit : Syrigos Travel
Information about Athens
Athens is a beautiful city named after the goddess of disciplined war and wisdom, Athena. It has a history of thousands of years. It is an important area from many points of view. Ancient Athens was a powerful city-state.
A center for the arts, learning and philosophy, home of Plato's Akademia and Aristotle's Lyceum, Athens was also the birthplace of Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles, and its many other prominent philosophers, writers and politicians of the ancient world.
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It is widely referred to as the cradle of Western Civilization, and the birthplace of democracy, largely due to the impact of its cultural and political achievements during the 5th and 4th centuries BC on the rest of the then known European continent.
Athens was built in the plains of Attika between the Parnitha, Penteli
and Hymettos mountains and close to the Saronic Gulf.
For ages its important geographic location and its mild climate were the main reasons why people chose to live here. During her very long history, Athens produced a brilliant civilization.
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The heritage of the classical era is still evident in the city, represented by a number of ancient monuments and works of art, the most famous of all the Parthenon on the Acropolis, widely considered an important landmark of early Western civilization.
The city also retains a vast variety of Roman and Byzantine monuments, as well as a small number of remaining Ottoman monuments projecting the city's long history across the centuries.
Landmarks of the modern era are also present, dating back to 1830 (the establishment of the independent Greek state), and taking in the Greek Parliament (19th century) and the Athens Trilogy (Library, University, and Academy).
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Athens was the host city of the first modern-day Olympic Games in 1896, and 108 years later it welcomed home the 2004 Summer Olympics, with great success.
Regarding to the climate Athens enjoys a typical mediterranean climate, with the greatest amounts of precipitation mainly occurring from mid-October to mid-April.
Any precipitation is sparse during summer and falls generally in the form of showers and/or thunderstorms.
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Due to its location in a strong rain shadow because of Mount Parnitha, however, the Athenian climate is much drier compared to most of the rest of mediterranean Europe. Athens city is one of the world's main centres of archaeological research.
Apart from national institutions, like Athens University, the Archaeological Society, several archaeological Museums (including the National Archaeological Museum, the Cycladic Museum, the Epigraphic Museum, the Byzantine Museum, as well as museums at the ancient Agora, Acropolis, and Kerameikos), the city is also home to the Demokritos laboratory for Archaeometry as well as several regional and national archaeological authorities that form part of the Greek Department of Culture.
Additionally, Athens hosts 17 Foreign Archaeological Institutes which promote and facilitate research by scholars from their respective home countries.
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As far as tourism is concerned Athens has been a popular destination for travellers since antiquity. Over the past decade, the infrastructure and social amenities of Athens have been radically improved.
The Greek Government, aided by the EU, has funded major infrastructure projects such as the state of the art, Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport, the massive expansion of the Athens Metro system and the new Attiki Odos Motorway.
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Due to the Olympic Games of 2004, Athens was turned into one of the most walkable, livable, exciting, art, music and entertainment centers in the world. By unifying all the antiquities with parks and pedestrian streets and avenues and tying them in with the nightlife areas of the Plaka, Psiri and Thission they have created a model that other cities are sure to follow.
With the new highways that divert traffic from the downtown they have not only made the city streets safer and the air cleaner but they have made it easier to get in and out of town by car, bus or taxi.
The new metro makes the trip to the airport and the port easier and opens up new neighborhoods to visitors who used to be confined to an island downtown surrounding the Acropolis. The coastal tram means you can get on one of the new air-conditioned light-rail cars and go to the beach, or shop and have dinner in the coastal suburbs.
Athens is entering a second Golden Age. The museums and galleries are renovated, air-conditioned and bigger and better with more opening every week.
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The streets are clean, hotels have all been renovated and restored, many made accessable to the disabled.
The restaurants, tavernas, cafes, clubs and bars stay open late and as many who came for the Olympics discovered, Athens rocks like no other city on earth.
And if you prefer a more quiet Athens there are parks and quiet neighborhoods that will suit you too.
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What this means is that anytime of the year Athens is entertaining, whether it is your stop-off on the way to and from the Greek Islands in the summer or if you visit during the 3 other seasons and use it as your base for daytrips to explore Peloponnese and mainland.
Athens has something for everybody and suddenly the Athenians have good reasons to be proud of their city.
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