Athens International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos opened on March 28, 2001 at Spata, east of the city, replacing the cramped seaside Ellinikon airport that had served Athens since the 1930s.
Named for statesman Eleftherios Venizelos, it was built in about five years as one of Europe's first major greenfield airports developed as a public-private partnership, with German construction group Hochtief as lead investor. Its debut was timed to modernize Greek infrastructure ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, for which it served as the main international gateway.
During construction, archaeologists uncovered significant finds from ancient settlements on the Mesogaia plain. A permanent exhibition of artifacts discovered on site is displayed inside the main terminal. The airport weathered the Greek financial crisis of the 2010s, then rebounded strongly as the home base of Aegean Airlines, Greece's largest carrier.
As a magnet for tourism that has driven repeated record traffic years. In 2011 it commissioned what was then among the largest airport solar farms in the world. The airport company listed on the Athens Stock Exchange in 2024 in one of Greece's biggest public offerings. A terminal expansion program is underway to lift capacity well beyond 30 million passengers a year.