Lycabettus Hill: free audio guide, funicular and hours

Lycabettus Hill is the 277 m cone that rises out of the middle of Athens, above the Kolonaki district. It belongs to the City of Athens and it is a public open space: no ticket, no ticket office, nothing to pay to walk up. A funicular runs to the top through a tunnel bored inside the rock. On the summit stand a whitewashed chapel, a restaurant, and the view people climb for.

What the audio guide tells you

It is free, it plays in your phone’s browser, and there is no app to install and no sign-up. Press play at the funicular station on Aristippou, or at the foot of the path if you are walking: the route climbs with you and comes back down through the pines.

It is free: there is no ticket and no ticket office

The big names in Athens all have a turnstile in front of them. Lycabettus does not. It is a green public space of the City of Athens, there is no ticket office anywhere on it, and walking up costs nothing. Nor does the hill publish opening hours: what has a timetable and a price is the funicular. There are 3 ways up, and they are not interchangeable.

The walk starts from the same corner as the funicular. Getting to that corner is the other half of it: the metro station to aim for is Evangelismos on line 3, the blue one from the airport, about 650 m away and all of it uphill through Kolonaki. From Syntagma it is about 1,000 m. The station sits at the top of Ploutarchou street, where it meets Aristippou.

The paths are fenced, surfaced and have 15 new benches along the route: you are not going cross-country.

The pines over your head are not ancient. At the start of the 19th century Lycabettus had no trees on it at all. Everything green on it comes from replanting works based on a study by Ernst Ziller that began in 1865 on the north face — which has been called Pefkakia, “the little pines”, ever since — and finished in 1896, the year of the first modern Olympic Games. It took 31 years to dress the hill.

The funicular: €10.00 one way, €13.00 return

A single ride costs €10.00 per person and a return €13.00. There are no reduced fares published and no online sales: you buy at the lower station before you go down to the platform.

The timetable is the part that changes how you plan the day. It runs every day of the year from 09:00 to 02:30, with departures every 30 minutes and up to every 10 minutes when it is busy. In the winter months it may stop earlier, so allow less margin in January.

Those 210 m are bored straight through the hill, so there is no view at all on the way up. There are 2 cars of 34 passengers each; they leave both ends at the same moment, pass midway and counterweight each other. The line opened on 18 April 1965. The restaurant at the top, Orizontes, opens every day from 12:30 to 00:30.

One practical warning: the lower station, at Aristippou 1, Kolonaki, 106 76, is marked as not wheelchair accessible.

Is it worth it if you have already seen the Acropolis?

Yes, and the reason is geometric rather than sentimental. Everywhere else in Athens you look up at the Acropolis. From 277 m you look down on it, and the whole rock — the slopes, the shape of it, the Parthenon on the crown — fits into a single glance. This is the highest point in central Athens and the second highest in the whole basin, behind the Tourkovounia.

The 2 places are tied together by the oldest story told about this hill. Athena had left the daughters of Cecrops a chest with the child Erichthonius inside it and an instruction not to open it. They opened it. A crow flew off to tell the goddess, who at that moment was carrying a mountain through the air to add to the rock of the Acropolis. On hearing the news, Athena flung the mountain down where it now stands — this hill — and ruled that the crow would never again be allowed to approach the Acropolis. The bird broke the story and lost the citadel. Stand on the summit and you can see exactly what she was aiming at.

Then there is the budget. The Acropolis ticket is €30.00 and the one for the Ancient Agora of Athens, spread out at the foot of the same rock, is €20.00. Lycabettus has no ticket at all, and no closing time to race: the archaeological sites shut in the evening, and the funicular here keeps running until 02:30. It is the one big view in the city you can add after the day is over.

The chapel of Agios Georgios on the summit

The white shape half of Athens can see from its balconies is the chapel of Agios Georgios, a single-nave basilica with a dome, built in the 18th century. It is small, lime-washed and standing on the literal high point: the bell tower reaches 285 m.

There is more history under it than building on it. In antiquity an altar of Zeus Akraios — Zeus of the summits — stood on this crown; the same god’s great sanctuary down on the flat is the Temple of Olympian Zeus. After that cult came a church of the Byzantine period, and the chapel you walk into was raised on top of all of it.

The bell tower went up in 1902, paid for by Nikolaos Thon, a wealthy landowner of King Othon’s court, and its large bell was cast in Russia. Beside the church stands a hermit’s cell of the 19th century, built by a Cretan monk who founded the church here and stayed on the summit for the rest of his life — when this was a bare cone you climbed, not a terrace with a restaurant on it.

The chapel does not publish opening hours, so finding it open is luck rather than planning. Its feast is Saint George, 23 April, and on Good Friday night the candle-lit Easter procession sets off from here.

Lower down the flank there is a second church that most people walk straight past: the Agioi Isidoroi, cut into the rock itself, of the 15th and 16th centuries, and opened for a single liturgy a year, on 13 September.

The theatre is open again, from May to early October

On the north flank, dropped into the hollow of one of the quarries worked on Lycabettus from 1831 to 1960, is an open-air amphitheatre: the City of Athens Lycabettus Theatre. It opened in 1965, spent more than a decade shut, and reopened on 15 September 2023 after the City of Athens restored it. It has 3,000 seats, and takes up to 6,000 spectators once you count the standing audience.

It works by seasons, from May to early October. The 2026 season ran from 15 May to 23 July and from 30 August to 5 October, with Greek tragedy and comedy alongside concerts. The 2027 programme comes out in parts, the first around May, but one date is already announced: Slash, on 18 July 2027. Tickets are sold through More.com, at a price that changes with every show.

On performance nights access on foot and on 2 wheels is free, but cars may only reach the theatre car park carrying disabled visitors or people over 60, or as taxis dropping off and picking up. There is a free shuttle bus from 19:00 to 21:30 leaving from Sarantapichou 3, running back again when the show ends.

Before you go: the day the hill can be shut

As for when: late afternoon. The funicular runs until 02:30 every day of the year, so sunset and the lit city afterwards are covered without hurrying. In daylight, the first hour of the morning gives the cleanest light and the least punishing climb.

The piece of planning no timetable carries: on days of very high fire risk the City of Athens can close the entire hill. In 2026 the hill was closed during the July heatwave and reopened at midnight on 1 August. These closures come with little notice and apply to the city’s green hills together. In July and August, check the day’s announcement before you set off.

The natural pairing is the Acropolis, which you can see whole from up here; below the same rock lies the Ancient Agora of Athens. Both, and the rest of the city, are on the free audio guides of Athens page.

The same guide in Spanish, written for a Spanish-speaking visitor and narrated in Spanish, is at Monte Licabeto en vozviajera.com.