Where to stay in Athens

Plaka runs from the Ancient Agora east to the Temple of Olympian Zeus, wrapped round the bottom of the Acropolis rock; Monastiraki is the square and market at its western end. The distances are the point. The Acropolis west entrance is ten minutes up Mnisikleous, the Agora is five, the Roman Agora is three, and Syntagma is eight along Ermou.

What you are paying for is that you can put the map away. Above Adrianou the streets are residential and stepped, and Anafiotika - the whitewashed lane built by Cycladic masons under the rock - is inside the district. Monastiraki station is the M1 and M3 interchange, so the airport is one train and Piraeus is one train.

The catch is the two streets everyone walks. Adrianou and Pandrossou are souvenir shops end to end, with waiters working the tables, and the prices on them are set for people who will be here once. Monastiraki Square is loud until 02:00 on Friday and Saturday. Wikivoyage lists Plaka among the places pickpockets work, along with the metro. And the ground is marble and steps, so a wheeled case is a bad idea for the last two hundred metres.

Psyri is the block immediately north of Ermou, between Monastiraki and Thiseio stations. It is old workshop streets - leather, hardware, tool shops that still open at 07:00 - with bars and small clubs in among them, and it is a five-minute walk to Monastiraki Square. The Athinas street market and the Varvakios meat hall are on its eastern edge.

Keep walking north and the character changes. Omonia is the M1/M2 interchange and the hotel belt around it has the cheapest central rooms in the city, often half what Plaka charges for the same standard. That is a real advantage if you are day-tripping to Delphi or the islands, because everything leaves from here.

It is also the part of the centre Athenians tell you to avoid at night. Open drug use around the square happens in daylight, the block between Agiou Konstantinou and Karolou empties out after dark, and Vathi Square, two streets further north, is worse. The practical answer is geography: book south of Sofokleous, towards Monastiraki, and the walk home is on Athinas or Ermou rather than through it.

Makrygianni is small - a handful of streets between the Acropolis Museum and Syngrou - and almost all of it is hotels. That is the reason to book it. The museum is on the corner, the Acropolis south entrance is five minutes up Dionysiou Areopagitou, the west entrance about eight, and Akropoli station on M2 is two stops from Syntagma.

Dionysiou Areopagitou is pedestrianised the whole way round the rock, so the side you look at is car-free. It is also the reason the rooftop terraces here are worth the premium: they face the Parthenon with nothing in between.

What you give up is a neighbourhood. The restaurants on Makrygianni street are priced for the museum queue, the coaches start unloading on the promenade at 09:00, and nothing here is open late - for a drink you walk into Koukaki or over to Plaka.

Koukaki starts where Makrygianni stops and runs down to Syngrou. It is a normal Athenian grid - five-storey blocks, balconies, a bakery on every second corner - and the reason to book it is arithmetic: the same room costs about half what it does the other side of the museum, and the Acropolis Museum is still a ten-minute walk.

Drakou street is the centre of it, pedestrianised, with tavernas and cafes that fill with people who live here rather than with the promenade crowd. Syngrou-Fix and Akropoli are both on M2, and the T6 tram from Fix runs down to the coast. Philopappou Hill, which gives the best free view of the Acropolis in the city, is at the top of the street.

The honest downsides are distance and stock. Monastiraki is twenty minutes on foot and the return leg is uphill in whatever the August temperature is. Nearly everything for rent here is a short-let flat rather than a hotel, so there is no desk, no early check-in and nobody to hold a bag. And there is nothing to see in the district itself, so every day starts with the same walk.

Kolonaki covers the south and south-east slopes of Lycabettus, north of Vasilissis Sofias. It is where the in-town money lives, which shows up as embassies, fashion boutiques and cafes around Plateia Kolonakiou where a coffee costs what a meal costs in Koukaki.

For a visitor the case is transport and museums. Evangelismos on M3 runs to the airport with no change at all, which is worth more than a nearer station. The Benaki Museum and the Museum of Cycladic Art are both inside the district, the Byzantine Museum is on its edge, and the Lycabettus funicular starts at the top of Ploutarchou. It is also quiet after midnight, which nowhere near Ermou is.

The cost is the walk and the bill. Monastiraki is twenty-five minutes away and the return is a climb. Vasilissis Sofias is six lanes of traffic and cuts the district off from Syntagma. And on a Sunday, when the boutiques shut, there is very little happening on the streets.

Pangrati sits east of the Panathenaic Stadium and south of Kolonaki: a grid of 1960s apartment blocks around Plateia Plastira and Plateia Varnava, the First Cemetery on its western edge, and the Ilissos valley running through it. Ten years ago nobody suggested staying here. Now it has the best concentration of ordinary good restaurants in central Athens.

It works as a base because it is a real neighbourhood that happens to be close in. Syntagma is a twenty-minute walk, the Acropolis about thirty, and the squares fill with Athenians rather than tour groups every evening. Prices for a flat sit well below Plaka or Kolonaki for more space and a quieter night.

The two costs are transport and sights. There is no metro station inside Pangrati - Evangelismos on M3 is a ten-minute walk from the northern edge and further from everywhere else - so you walk or take a bus. And apart from the stadium, nothing here is old: this is a twentieth-century district, and the classical Athens you came for is all to the west.

Mets is small - a dozen streets climbing Ardittos hill behind the Panathenaic Stadium, named after a nineteenth-century Bavarian brewery. It is one of the few parts of central Athens where prewar houses survived the 1960s, so the streets have gardens, two-storey villas and bougainvillea instead of concrete balconies.

For a couple or a quiet trip it is close to ideal. The Acropolis museum is fifteen minutes on foot around the base of the hill, Syntagma about twenty, and Pangrati's restaurants are over the road - but the district itself has almost no traffic and goes silent at night, which nowhere else within this radius does.

What you accept is that it is tiny and it is a hill. There is no metro station, barely a shop, and perhaps five places to eat; anything else means walking down into Pangrati or across to Makrygianni, and back up afterwards. The First Cemetery takes up a good part of the district, which bothers some people and is in practice the quietest green space in Athens.

Exarcheia sits north of Panepistimio, between the polytechnic and Strefi Hill. It is a student and political district and has been for fifty years, which is why the rooms are cheap for the distance: Monastiraki is twenty minutes on foot and the National Archaeological Museum is on the north-west edge.

What is good here is specific. The bars and tavernas around Plateia Exarcheion and along Themistokleous open late and are priced for students, the bookshops are real bookshops, and the live music at the foot of Strefi Hill is rock rather than bouzouki-for-visitors. Nobody is selling you anything.

What is not: there is no metro station in the district, so Panepistimio or Omonia is a ten-minute walk each way. Clashes between anarchist groups and riot police happen around the square, with tear gas, and Wikivoyage warns that cars parked here overnight get damaged. The graffiti and shuttered shopfronts are permanent, not a phase, and they are the first thing you will see arriving at 22:00 with a suitcase.

Apostolou Pavlou runs along the west side of the Acropolis, car-free, from Thiseio station to the Acropolis west entrance in about ten minutes. Thiseio is the flat part at the bottom: cafes facing the rock, the Ancient Agora at one end and the Kerameikos cemetery site at the other, and a station on M1, the oldest line in the city.

Ano Petralona is the same district climbing the hill behind it. Rooms there cost roughly what Koukaki costs and well under half of Plaka, the tavernas round Plateia Merkouri are neighbourhood places, and the Sunday street market is a real one. The reader's choice between the two is basically money against gradient.

The gradient is the con. Ano Petralona is a climb from Petralona or Thiseio station every single time, and Athens in August does not forgive that. Thiseio's own cafes are priced for the promenade crowd. M1 is the line the pickpocket warnings name specifically. And Philopappou Hill, which separates this district from Koukaki, is the one green space in the centre that Wikivoyage says to keep off at night.

Gazi is the few blocks around the Technopolis gasworks and Kerameikos station on M3, which is what created the district: the station opened in 2007 and the clubs followed it into the abandoned factories. It is the centre of Athens's gay nightlife, and the rest of the bars, live-music halls and small theatres sit in the same industrial shells around Pireos and Iera Odos. Rouf is the working end behind it, still mostly warehouses.

For a visitor the geography works better than it looks. Kerameikos runs direct to the airport, Monastiraki is twenty minutes on foot along Ermou past the Kerameikos site, and the rooms cost roughly what Koukaki charges.

The trade is what the streets do the rest of the time. There are very few shops, the blocks are long with no through traffic, and by day it is warehouses. Club noise runs to 04:00 at the weekend and it happens on the street below the window rather than inside the building. In July and August the whole scene relocates to the beach clubs on the coast, and what is left is the industrial part.

Syngrou Avenue is the six-lane road from the Temple of Olympian Zeus to the sea, and the big international hotels are strung along it. Behind them Neos Kosmos is an ordinary residential district with a station on M2 two stops from Syntagma and the T6 tram running down to the water.

On paper it is a good deal: the brand names at well under central rates, a pool in August, and the Onassis Stegi concert hall on the avenue. That is why it gets booked. On a booking map it also looks close, because the distance to the Acropolis is only about two kilometres.

What that two kilometres is made of is the problem. It is a motorway-scale avenue with no reason to walk any of it, so in practice every trip in and out is the metro, thirty minutes on foot or a taxi. There is nothing here to do in the evening once you come back, and the buildings that face Syngrou take its traffic noise from 06:00. Book it if you want a pool and a business rate. Do not book it expecting to be in Athens.