Athens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport

Athens Eleftherios Venizelos International is Greece's dominant gateway, handling the entire country's long-haul traffic and the great majority of its European service across 174 destinations served by 88 airlines — one of the broadest international network spreads in the eastern Mediterranean. Opened in 2001 to replace the landlocked Hellinikon, ATH sits 20 km east of Athens near Spata-Artemida on the Mesogaia plain, freeing the city from decades of overhead jet noise and allowing Hellinikon's beachfront site to be redeveloped. Aegean Airlines operates its main hub here as Greece's largest carrier and a Star Alliance member, with Olympic Air (now an Aegean subsidiary) feeding the domestic island network. ATH also handles Athens's disproportionate share of seasonal European leisure traffic — Ryanair, easyJet, Wizz Air, TUI, and Condor run heavy summer operations — and hosts transatlantic service from Delta, United, American, and Emirates' fifth-freedom Newark route via Athens. Two parallel runways, 13,123 ft (4,000 m) and 12,467 ft (3,800 m), allow simultaneous independent operations. The airport sits at 308 ft (94 m) elevation on the Mesogaia basin and was engineered to minimize noise impact, with runway headings aligned to avoid overflight of populated areas during prevailing northerly winds. The single Main Terminal Building consolidates all Schengen and non-Schengen operations with a satellite pier reached via airside shuttle, and a major T1 expansion and second-terminal project is underway to lift annual capacity toward 40M. ATH's combination of a young facility, direct metro access, and geographic positioning between Europe, the Middle East, and Africa has made it one of Europe's fastest-growing airports of the past decade.