Foreign investors-Real estate in Greece-Golden visaΑbout: Golden Visa in Greece: Citizenship by Investment
"Greek Golden Visa is a residence permit by investment issued under the Greek state programme. The investor and their family get the status of residents in exchange for making investment into real estate, public securities, Greek business or making a bank deposit. A Golden Visa is a plastic card with an integrated chip, a photograph, and personal data.
The holders of a Greek Golden Visa do not have to live in Greece or pass a Greek language exam. Greek Golden Visa is extended once every five years as long as the investor maintains the property and still wants to be a resident."
The investor may obtain a golden visa by acquisition of a rental apartment, resort or commercial property, or a land plot with any purported use.
Benefits
- The right to stay legitimately in Greece for unlimited time.
- The right to stay legitimately in the Schengen countries for up to 90 days each six months.
- 4–5% rental income per annum if your real property is rental.
- The prices of apartments in Athens increase by up to 10% annually.
- A permanent resident may apply for citizenship in seven years of permanent stay (the conditions are discussed on case‑by‑case basis).
Greek golden visa is recognised as the most attractive programme in Europe in 2022, while Latvia announced closing of its Golden Visa programme, Portugal changed the eligibility criteria shifting focus on commercial property, and the costs of obtaining residence permit in Spain rose twice as high as in Greece. Housing prices in Greece are upbeat gaining up to 11% per annum and 2022 prices are yet to reach the level of the 2008 financial crisis.The Greek programme boasts rather fast application processing and low rate of refusals. A lawyer acting under a power of attorney may close your transaction and apply for a Golden Visa. You will have to come in person at the end of the procedure to do the fingerprinting.
Where to buy real estate in Greece
The location depends on your goals. Choose your resort property in the location where you like to spend time: Athens Riviera, the islands or in southern Greece, in the Peloponnese and more specifically in the area of Messinia, rich in mountains and sea and monuments to visit, which in recent years has seen enormous tourist development. It has international airport with direct connections to many foreign cities and is world famous for its olives, olive oil and its amazing microclimate!
Real estate might not rise in price dramatically here but margin is not your main goal.
We recommend Athens for real estate rental business. 50% Greek population live in Athens — it's the heart of the country. Real estate prices here are constantly on the rise and investors enjoy steady demand all the year round. The investor might consider buying one or two buy‑to‑let apartments here and rent them out. Any part of Athens suits this purpose, and the choice would depend only on your expectations as to the tenant‑lessor relation structuring and the rent rate.
Athens is worth considering as the location for your own living.
Why Greece?
Greece is an incredibly safe country. It also offers a socialized healthcare system, providing free emergency care to any person, independent of their nationality. Furthermore, Greek is a country that values traditional, slow ways of life. It places emphasis on family, rest, wholesome nourishment, and living life to the fullest; the Greeks have truly found out how to perfect simplicity, making it a great country for anyone to visit often or call home.
Benefits of Pursuing Greece’s Golden Visa
As mentioned, there are a number of rich benefits to consider when applying for the Greece Golden Visa. Whether investors are trying to travel more freely around the European Union, find respite from dangerous circumstances in their home country, or enjoy tax benefits, the Greece Residency by Investment Program has it all. Some of the most popular benefits are:
Travel Benefits
With a Greece Golden Visa in hand, investors can travel to any country in the Schengen Zone for up to 90 days out of every 6 months. The countries in the Schengen Zone are notoriously challenging to obtain visas for, so having visa-free access to them is a major benefit of this program.
Tax Benefits
Becoming a Greek tax resident can bring monetary savings to investors because this allows each investor to pay a flat fee on their income instead of a percentage basis. Primary investors can choose to pay a flat annual tax of €100,000 no matter how high their income is.
Path to the EU Citizenship
Since the Greece Golden Visa allows investors and their families to reside in Greece full time if they want to, it offers a path to citizenship that can otherwise be difficult to come by. After 5 years of residency, investors can apply for permanent residency. Then, after another 2 years, investors can apply for citizenship.
ATHENS
Athens is a major coastal city in the Mediterranean and is both the capital and largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh largest city in the European Union. Athens dominates and is the capital of the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, with its recorded history spanning over 3,400 years and its earliest human presence beginning somewhere between the 11th and 7th millennia BCE.
Classical Athens was a powerful city-state. It was a centre for the arts, learning and philosophy, and the home of Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum. It is widely referred to as the cradle of Western civilization and the birthplace of democracy,largely because of its cultural and political influence on the European continent—particularly Ancient Rome. In modern times, Athens is a large cosmopolitan metropolis and central to economic, financial, industrial, maritime, political and cultural life in Greece. In 2023, Athens' surrounding metropolitan area had a population of 3.1 million.
Athens is a Beta-status global city according to the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, and is one of the biggest economic centers in Southeastern Europe. It also has a large financial sector, and its port Piraeus is both the largest passenger port in Europe, and the third largest in the world.
The Municipality of Athens (also City of Athens), which actually constitutes a small administrative unit of the entire city, had a population of 637,798 (in 2021) within its official limits, and a land area of 38.96 km2 (15.04 sq mi). The Athens Metropolitan Area or Greater Athens extends beyond its administrative municipal city limits, with a population of 3,722,544 (in 2021) over an area of 412 km2 (159 sq mi). Athens is also the southernmost capital on the European mainland and the warmest major city in continental Europe with an average annual temperature of up to 19.8 °C (67.6 °F) locally
The heritage of the Classical Era is still evident in the city, represented by ancient monuments, and works of art, the most famous of all being the Parthenon, considered a key landmark of early Western civilization. The city also retains Roman, Byzantine and a smaller number of Ottoman monuments, while its historical urban core features elements of continuity through its millennia of history. Athens is home to two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the Acropolis of Athens and the medieval Daphni Monastery. Landmarks of the modern era, dating back to the establishment of Athens as the capital of the independent Greek state in 1834, include the Hellenic Parliament and the so-called "Architectural Trilogy of Athens", consisting of the National Library of Greece, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and the Academy of Athens. Athens is also home to several museums and cultural institutions, such as the National Archeological Museum, featuring the world's largest collection of ancient Greek antiquities, the Acropolis Museum, the Museum of Cycladic Art, the Benaki Museum, and the Byzantine and Christian Museum. Athens was the host city of the first modern-day Olympic Games in 1896, and 108 years later it hosted the 2004 Summer Olympics, making it one of the few cities to have hosted the Olympics more than once.Athens joined the UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities in 2016.
Etymology and names
Further information: Names of European cities in different languages (A)
Athena, patron goddess of Athens; (Varvakeion Athena, National Archaeological Museum)
In Ancient Greek, the name of the city was Ἀθῆναι (Athênai, pronounced [atʰɛ̂ːnai̯] in Classical Attic) a plural. In earlier Greek, such as Homeric Greek, the name had been current in the singular form though, as Ἀθήνη (Athḗnē). It was possibly rendered in the plural later on, like those of Θῆβαι (Thêbai) and Μυκῆναι (Μukênai). The root of the word is probably not of Greek or Indo-European origin, and is possibly a remnant of the Pre-Greek substrate of Attica. In antiquity, it was debated whether Athens took its name from its patron goddess Athena (Attic Ἀθηνᾶ, Athēnâ, Ionic Ἀθήνη, Athḗnē, and Doric Ἀθάνα, Athā́nā) or Athena took her name from the city. Modern scholars now generally agree that the goddess takes her name from the city, because the ending -ene is common in names of locations, but rare for personal names.
According to the ancient Athenian founding myth, Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, competed against Poseidon, the God of the Seas, for patronage of the yet-unnamed city; they agreed that whoever gave the Athenians the better gift would become their patron and appointed Cecrops, the king of Athens, as the judge. According to the account given by Pseudo-Apollodorus, Poseidon struck the ground with his trident and a salt water spring welled up. In an alternative version of the myth from Vergil's poem Georgics, Poseidon instead gave the Athenians the first horse. In both versions, Athena offered the Athenians the first domesticated olive tree. Cecrops accepted this gift and declared Athena the patron goddess of Athens. Eight different etymologies, now commonly rejected, have been proposed since the 17th century. Christian Lobeck proposed as the root of the name the word ἄθος (áthos) or ἄνθος (ánthos) meaning "flower", to denote Athens as the "flowering city". Ludwig von Döderlein proposed the stem of the verb θάω, stem θη- (tháō, thē-, "to suck") to denote Athens as having fertile soil.Athenians were called cicada-wearers (Ancient Greek: Τεττιγοφόροι) because they used to wear pins of golden cicadas. A symbol of being autochthonous (earth-born), because the legendary founder of Athens, Erechtheus was an autochthon or of being musicians, because the cicada is a "musician" insect. In classical literature, the city was sometimes referred to as the City of the Violet Crown, first documented in Pindar's ἰοστέφανοι Ἀθᾶναι (iostéphanoi Athânai), or as τὸ κλεινὸν ἄστυ (tò kleinòn ásty, "the glorious city").
During the medieval period, the name of the city was rendered once again in the singular as Ἀθήνα. Variant names included Setines, Satine, and Astines, all derivations involving false splitting of prepositional phrases. King Alphonse X of Castile gives the pseudo-etymology 'the one without death/ignorance'.
After the establishment of the modern Greek state, and partly due to the conservatism of the written language, Ἀθῆναι [aˈθine] again became the official name of the city and remained so until the abandonment of Katharevousa in the 1970s, when Ἀθήνα, Athína, became the official name.Today, it is often simply called η πρωτεύουσα ī protévousa; 'the capital'.
History of Athens
The oldest known human presence in Athens is the Cave of Schist, which has been dated to between the 11th and 7th millennia BCE. Athens has been continuously inhabited for at least 5,000 years (3000 BCE). By 1400 BCE, the settlement had become an important centre of the Mycenaean civilization, and the Acropolis was the site of a major Mycenaean fortress, whose remains can be recognised from sections of the characteristic Cyclopean walls. Unlike other Mycenaean centers, such as Mycenae and Pylos, it is not known whether Athens suffered destruction in about 1200 BCE, an event often attributed to a Dorian invasion, and the Athenians always maintained that they were pure Ionians with no Dorian element. However, Athens, like many other Bronze Age settlements, went into economic decline for around 150 years afterwards.
Iron Age burials, in the Kerameikos and other locations, are often richly provided for and demonstrate that from 900 BCE onwards Athens was one of the leading centres of trade and prosperity in the region. The leading position of Athens may well have resulted from its central location in the Greek world, its secure stronghold on the Acropolis and its access to the sea, which gave it a natural advantage over inland rivals such as Thebes and Sparta.
Delian League, under the leadership of Athens before the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE
By the sixth century BCE, widespread social unrest led to the reforms of Solon. These would pave the way for the eventual introduction of democracy by Cleisthenes in 508 BCE. Athens had by this time become a significant naval power with a large fleet, and helped the rebellion of the Ionian cities against Persian rule. In the ensuing Greco-Persian Wars Athens, together with Sparta, led the coalition of Greek states that would eventually repel the Persians, defeating them decisively at Marathon in 490 BCE, and crucially at Salamis in 480 BCE. However, this did not prevent Athens from being captured and sacked twice by the Persians within one year, after a heroic but ultimately failed resistance at Thermopylae by Spartans and other Greeks led by King Leonidas, after both Boeotia and Attica fell to the Persians.
The decades that followed became known as the Golden Age of Athenian democracy, during which time Athens became the leading city of Ancient Greece, with its cultural achievements laying the foundations for Western civilization.[citation needed] The playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides flourished in Athens during this time, as did the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the physician Hippocrates, and the philosopher Socrates. Guided by Pericles, who promoted the arts and fostered democracy, Athens embarked on an ambitious building program that saw the construction of the Acropolis of Athens (including the Parthenon), as well as empire-building via the Delian League. Originally intended as an association of Greek city-states to continue the fight against the Persians, the league soon turned into a vehicle for Athens's own imperial ambitions. The resulting tensions brought about the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), in which Athens was defeated by its rival Sparta.
By the mid-4th century BCE, the northern Greek kingdom of Macedon was becoming dominant in Athenian affairs. In 338 BCE the armies of Philip II defeated an alliance of some of the Greek city-states including Athens and Thebes at the Battle of Chaeronea, effectively ending Athenian independence. Later, under Rome, Athens was given the status of a free city because of its widely admired schools. In the second century AD, The Roman emperor Hadrian, himself an Athenian citizen, ordered the construction of a library, a gymnasium, an aqueduct which is still in use, several temples and sanctuaries, a bridge and financed the completion of the Temple of Olympian Zeus.
By the end of Late Antiquity, Athens had shrunk due to sacks by the Herulians, Visigoths, and Early Slavs which caused massive destruction in the city. In this era, the first Christian churches were built in Athens, and the Parthenon and other temples were converted into churches.[citation needed] Athens expanded its settlement in the second half of the Middle Byzantine Period, in the ninth to tenth centuries AD, and was relatively prosperous during the Crusades, benefiting from Italian trade. After the Fourth Crusade the Duchy of Athens was established. In 1458, it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire and entered a long period of decline.
Following the Greek War of Independence and the establishment of the Greek Kingdom, Athens was chosen as the capital of the newly independent Greek state in 1834, largely because of historical and sentimental reasons.[citation needed] At the time, after the extensive destruction it had suffered during the war of independence, it was reduced to a town of about 4,000 people (less than half its earlier population) in a loose swarm of houses along the foot of the Acropolis. The first King of Greece, Otto of Bavaria, commissioned the architects Stamatios Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert to design a modern city plan fit for the capital of a state.
The first modern city plan consisted of a triangle defined by the Acropolis, the ancient cemetery of Kerameikos and the new palace of the Bavarian king (now housing the Greek Parliament), so as to highlight the continuity between modern and ancient Athens. Neoclassicism, the international style of this epoch, was the architectural style through which Bavarian, French and Greek architects such as Hansen, Klenze, Boulanger or Kaftantzoglou designed the first important public buildings of the new capital.[citation needed] In 1896, Athens hosted the first modern Olympic Games. During the 1920s a number of Greek refugees, expelled from Asia Minor after the Greco-Turkish War and Greek genocide, swelled Athens's population; nevertheless it was most particularly following World War II, and from the 1950s and 1960s, that the population of the city exploded[citation needed], and Athens experienced a gradual expansion.
In the 1980s, it became evident that smog from factories and an ever-increasing fleet of automobiles, as well as a lack of adequate free space due to congestion, had evolved into the city's most important challenge.[citation needed] A series of anti-pollution measures taken by the city's authorities in the 1990s, combined with a substantial improvement of the city's infrastructure (including the Attiki Odos motorway, the expansion of the Athens Metro, and the new Athens International Airport), considerably alleviated pollution and transformed Athens into a much more functional city. In 2004, Athens hosted the 2004 Summer Olympics.
Temporary accommodation for the Greek refugees from Asia Minor in tents in Thiseio. After the Asia Minor Catastrophe in 1922 thousands of families settled in Athens and the population of the city doubled.
Temporary accommodation for the Greek refugees from Asia Minor in tents in Thiseio. After the Asia Minor Catastrophe in 1922 thousands of families settled in Athens and the population of the city doubled.
Geography
Athens sprawls across the central plain of Attica that is often referred to as the Athens Basin or the Attica Basin (Greek: Λεκανοπέδιο Αθηνών/Αττικής). The basin is bounded by four large mountains: Mount Aigaleo to the west, Mount Parnitha to the north, Mount Pentelicus to the northeast and Mount Hymettus to the east. Beyond Mount Aegaleo lies the Thriasian plain, which forms an extension of the central plain to the west. The Saronic Gulf lies to the southwest. Mount Parnitha is the tallest of the four mountains (1,413 m (4,636 ft)), and has been declared a national park. The Athens urban area spreads over 50 kilometres (31 mi) from Agios Stefanos in the north to Varkiza in the south. The city is located in the north temperate zone, 38 degrees north of the equator.
Athens is built around a number of hills. Lycabettus is one of the tallest hills of the city proper and provides a view of the entire Attica Basin. The meteorology of Athens is deemed to be one of the most complex in the world because its mountains cause a temperature inversion phenomenon which, along with the Greek government's difficulties controlling industrial pollution, was responsible for the air pollution problems the city has faced. This issue is not unique to Athens; for instance, Los Angeles and Mexico City also suffer from similar atmospheric inversion problems.
The Cephissus river, the Ilisos and the Eridanos stream are the historical rivers of Athens.
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