High Court Issues Latest Deadline to Demolish Hotel’s Top 3 Floors

Six years after a landmark decision by the Council of State (CoS), Greece’s highest administrative court, ordering the demolition of the top floors of a boutique downtown Athens hotel deemed as exceeding height restrictions, and nary a brick has been removed from the structure.

The has case run the gamut of Greece’s legal system and the verdict is now final and irrevocable. In the intervening six years, in fact, the plaintiffs also appealed four times to a special judicial committee tasked with ensuring that the state itself adheres to CoS decisions. Local residents had filed lawsuits to declare that the structure’s height was illegal. A majority of CoS justices agreed, saying that the building blocked views of the Acropolis, and was thus a violation of laws related to archaeological sites

Based on the high court’s decision, an outlay of 350,000 euros to demolish the top floors of the Coco Mat hotel will be borne by a prefectural administrative entity, and not by the hotel’s owners, given that the latter had been issued (by the Athens municipality, among others) valid building permits for the construction.

A latest ruling by the CoS now gives the public administration six months to proceed with the demolition work to slice off the last three storeys of the hotel, which is located in the Makriyianni district off the southeast side of Greece’s best-known monument.

According to reports, prefectural entity, known as the Decentralized Administration of Attica, also failed to include the demolition figure in its 2025 budget, and is now liable to pay fines imposed by the judicial branch.

The building licenses that were issued by municipal and prefectural authorities, but which were later ruled illegal by the high court, allowed for the construction of a 10-storey hotel, three underground levels, a “green roof” and an open pool.