hiking up the hills around Athens

After posting about our splendid hike at Mt Olympus, I probably shouldn’t call the activities I describe in this post ‘hikes’ – a ‘stroll’ may be a better word. Regardless, Athens has quite a few hills at its borders, and they provide magnificent views of the city and an easy escape into the wild-ish. Not many people seem to be aware of that, so it was easy for us to find trails where we could hike naked without “disturbing” anyone.

Alsos Skopeftiriou hill at the eastern edge of Athens provides an immense panoramic view.

It’s covered by a nice mix of trees, shrubs and grasses.

It is nice to sit and relax there on a later autumn or an early spring day, which would be too cold for a beach but good enough to sunbathe there.

There are lot of different flowers,

some manage to thrive just in a crack in the rock!

We weren’t the only ones enjoying those flowers though 🙂

Just in case you don’t like sitting in the grass, there’s a cozy rock that lets you to recline and enjoy the perfect view of Athens!

Then we also found a base a column – doubtfully from the times of Ancient Greece, but it gave another opportunity for nude photography with an obvious influence from Greek statues.

It’s certainly worth staying there till sunset, as you’ll be rewarded with yet another beautiful view with a silhouette of Acropolis!

Oros Egaleo hills lie in the opposite part of Athens, at the western boundary of the city. So, you’ll have a view of the city and aforementioned Alsos Skopeftiriou hill as well as mountainous area of Dasos Kesarianis behind it.

This time, I was under Ancient Greek influence too: wearing nothing but sandals. I got a pair of Spartan-styled sandals from the ‘poet shoe-maker’ in Athens, Stavros Melissinos.

This hill was full of flowers too, but interestingly of mostly different species than at Alsos Skopeftiriou.

And again, we weren’t the only ones enjoying those flowers 🙂

There’s a pretty dense coniferous forest at the foothills,

so you need to go higher to get the best views.

With numerous trails and intersections, it may be hard to choose where to go,

but it probably doesn’t matter much – as long as you go up, you’ll end up with magnificent views of Athens.

Although I am not a big fan of using nude imagery in advertisement of clothing, I think it is very appropriate to give some props to Stavros Melissinos‘s sandals again with the photo below (I hope he’d approve it :-)). I really like how light and open they feel, and yet they stay firmly on your feet thanks to long laces. You will have to visit Stavros Melissinos‘s store in Athens to buy them, as he wants to make sure they fit well to every customer.

In any case, whatever you wear (or not wear), I highly recommend hiking up the hills around Athens.