Kifisia is where Athens went to breathe. Fourteen kilometres north and a few hundred metres higher, it stays cooler than the basin all summer, and once the railway reached it in 1885 the city's bourgeoisie built their villas here and turned a mountain village into a garden suburb. The old line-1 train — the M1, still the ISAP everyone calls it — drops you at the door.
Start in the plane-tree square outside the station, then climb toward Kefalari past the belle-époque villas: turrets and verandas and overgrown gardens, some restored, some gently rotting. The Goulandris Natural History Museum sits in one such mansion — an hour well spent if it's open. Keep going up.
The destination is Kefalari, where the springs surface under enormous plane trees and the temperature actually drops. This shaded hollow is why the suburb exists; stand under the biggest tree and listen to the water. Climb to the little rock-set chapel above if you've the legs. Then come back down to the café terraces ringing the hollow, take a cold coffee in the cool under the planes — the Athenian weekend in one image — and walk back to the M1.
