Schinias – Marathonas
The smallest of Greece's national parks — a reed marsh, a stone-pine forest and a rocky spit on the plain of Marathon, with an Olympic rowing course dug through the middle of it.
Greece keeps its national parks large and mountainous, which makes Εθνικό Πάρκο Σχινιά – Μαραθώνα the odd one out: about fourteen square kilometres, part of it sea, lying flat against the coast some forty kilometres north-east of Athens. It was declared by presidential decree in 2000, published as ΦΕΚ 395/Δ΄, and it is the smallest of the sixteen areas Greece designates as εθνικά πάρκα. Six ecosystems sit inside the boundary — the Great Marsh, the pine forest behind the beach, the Makaria spring that feeds both, the Kynosoura peninsula, the shore and the marine zone — and the decree cuts them into nine zones, running from strict nature protection through to tourism and recreation.
Makaria is a karst spring at the foot of the hills, with a mean discharge estimated at about 810 cubic metres an hour, named — Pausanias says — for the daughter of Herakles who killed herself so that the Athenians could win their war. It fed what was the largest wetland in Attica and still feeds what is left of it. The forest behind the beach mixes Aleppo pine with Pinus pinea, the umbrella-crowned stone pine, whose natural stands in Greece can be counted on one hand; the others are Strofylia in the north-west Peloponnese and Koukounaries on Skiathos. East of the trees, Kynosoura — "dog's tail" — runs out into the South Euboean Gulf as a narrow limestone ridge under maquis. Nineteen habitat types have been mapped here and 115 bird species recorded. The channels hold Pelasgus marathonicus, the Marathon minnow, a small fish named for this plain and confined to Greece, occurring here and in the Sperchios and Kifissos drainages.
The plain is also the battlefield. In 490 BC the Persians came ashore along this bay, and Pausanias, walking the ground six centuries later, describes a lake "which for the most part is marshy" into which the retreating Persians blundered in ignorance of the roads; he thought it accounted for their heaviest losses. The Soros, the mound raised over the 192 Athenian dead Herodotus counts, still stands a few kilometres inland. Drainage works begun in 1923 sent the spring water straight to the sea. The scheme was never finished, so half the marsh went under the plough and the rest stayed as damp ground, and a civil airstrip was laid across it — cleared away by January 2002.
What replaced the airstrip was the 2004 Olympic rowing course: two kilometres of racing water, fourteen thousand seats and some eighty-eight million euros, excavated inside a park boundary drawn four years earlier. WWF Greece, the Hellenic Society for the Protection of Nature, Europa Nostra and the Academy of Athens all objected; a complaint reached the Bern Convention standing committee in 2001 and was closed the same year. The verdict since is mixed. The course laid a permanent sheet of open water over what had been drained field, but it draws on the same spring as the marsh, and interruptions to that supply have dried parts of the wetland out. On 16 August 2004 the whole day's racing was called off, with gusts near fifty kilometres an hour making the course unrowable. After two decades of neglect the centre was restored to its original condition and reopened in 2026, with roughly a million euros from Alpha Bank and the work coordinated by the Hellenic Olympic Committee.
What's worth knowing before you go
Marathonas is the gateway, with Nea Makri the other approach from the south. Orange KTEL Attikis buses leave Athens from Mavromateon Street on the edge of Pedion tou Areos, a short walk from Victoria metro, and take about an hour and a half; summer services run on to Schinias beach itself, but out of season you will be covering the last few kilometres from Marathonas by taxi. Driving is simpler — Attiki Odos, then Nea Makri and Marathon — with parking at the beach and at the archaeological museum at Vrana. April and May are the best weeks, for spring passage and for the marsh at its fullest, with late September and October good for the return. Avoid July and August weekends: this is one of the beaches Athens goes to, the pine forest fills with parked cars, and some zones take more visitors than they were designed for. The meltemi that stopped the Olympic regatta is the same wind that fills the far end of the beach with windsurfers in August.
In the pine wood, look for the sprinkler heads. An automatic fire-suppression system was laid through the stand in 2004, and it is the plainest statement of what the people running this park actually lie awake about.