Sixty years of Athenian summer, one hundred million euros of renovation

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By Marta Diaz · 13 Jul 2026 · 8 min read

In 1961, a row of cabanas opened on the Vouliagmeni peninsula and Athenians started calling the strip of coastline Astir. Within a decade the resort had opened the city's first waterskiing school, a genuine novelty for Greece at the time, and Astir Beach had become, by local consensus, the best place in Athens to swim. More than sixty years on, the cabanas are gone, but the reputation has outlasted them.

The Arion building opened in 1967, followed by Nafsika in 1979, and for decades the state-run resort hosted diplomats, shipping families and the occasional head of state on a peninsula deliberately kept apart from the rest of the city. By the 2010s it needed more than upkeep.

Four Seasons and the site's Greek owners announced a partnership that closed the resort for a total renovation, reopening in March 2019 as the brand's first hotel in Greece after an investment exceeding 100 million euros. The result keeps the peninsula's 1960s bones, low-rise, garden-set, unhurried, while bringing the interiors and infrastructure fully current.

The estate covers 30 hectares and three private beaches, two of them, beside the Arion and Nafsika buildings, linked by a 300-metre seafront boardwalk. A separate area of bungalows holds its own beach and a scatter of quiet coves along the bay, giving guests staying there a materially different, more secluded stay than those in the main buildings.

A resort this well loved does not need reinventing. It needs looking after properly, which is a harder job.

Eight restaurants and bars operate on the property itself, and the wider Astir peninsula adds two more names worth knowing: Matsuhisa Athens, Nobu Matsuhisa's Japanese-Peruvian outpost, and Beefbar Athens, both within walking distance of the hotel and popular enough with Athenians that a table often needs booking well ahead, not just by hotel guests.

Family travel gets real thought here rather than a token kids' club: supervised programming runs through the day within sight of the beach, and bungalow-category rooms give families with young children the buffer of their own outdoor space rather than a shared corridor.

The peninsula sits roughly twenty minutes from central Athens by car, close enough that a morning at the Acropolis and an afternoon on Astir Beach fit into the same day without feeling like a compromise either way. May to September is the season that makes sense of the beach; the hotel runs quieter, and arguably better for a city-focused stay, either side of it.

Written by Marta Diaz · CEO & Editor-in-Chief

Avid tennis player, photographer and traveller. She curates every hotel in the collection and writes The Edit.