Athens mayor warns 8 million tourists

Athens Mayor Haris Doukas says the city has hit its tourism limit and wants new curbs in the historic center. (ekathimerini.com) In an interview published April 25, Doukas said Athens had more than 8 million visitors last year and that housing and infrastructure were under strain. He said the city of roughly 700,000 residents “cannot operate as if it were a giant hotel.” (ekathimerini.com) Doukas said he plans to use a tourism land-use bill now under debate to push for a blanket ban on new tourism-related businesses in Plaka, including hotels and short-term rentals. He said “there’s no more room” in the neighborhood. (ekathimerini.com) The mayor had already raised the idea on April 21 at the “This is Athens - Agora” forum, where he said the city needed to decide how much extra tourist load it could carry and warned Athens “must not become Barcelona.” (euronews.com) Athens is not starting from zero. Greece already froze new short-term rental permits in the city’s 1st, 2nd and 3rd municipal districts, the core areas around the center most exposed to tourism pressure. (euronews.com) (news.gtp.gr) By February, that freeze had cut active short-term rental registrations in those three districts by about 2,500, to 27,000 from 29,500, according to data presented at the Short Stay Athens Conference 2026. (news.gtp.gr) The same conference data showed central Athens listings were down 8%, but the national short-term rental market was still large: 247,000 properties and about 1 million beds were available across Greece at the August peak. (news.gtp.gr) Tourism demand has kept rising. Athens International Airport handled 34 million passengers in 2025, and in the first four months of that year traffic was already up 10.6% from the same period in 2024. (passport.news) (media.aia.gr) Some hotel operators are not rejecting tighter planning outright. Euronews reported Evgenios Vassilikos, head of the Athens-Attica & Argosaronic Hotel Association, said Athens should look at foreign models, including Barcelona’s hotel licensing limits. (euronews.com) Short-term rental advocates are pushing back on the housing argument. At the February conference, Athens-Attica Realtors Association president Lefteris Potamianos said short-term rentals were “not responsible for the housing crisis” and argued supply-demand problems came first. (news.gtp.gr) For now, the fight is over whether Athens keeps adding beds in its oldest neighborhoods or starts drawing a hard line around them. (ekathimerini.com) (euronews.com)