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.