The Olive Woodland of Filopappou HillDeliberately planted, not inherited

Before 1954, Filopappou Hill was mostly bare, grazed down to scrub with the occasional stray olive holding on. What covers it today, a deliberately hypnotic woodland of hundreds of olive trees planted in staggered density, is design rather than survival. The architect Dimitris Pikionis spent three years reshaping the hill by hand, with his students and local stonemasons paving footpaths from salvaged marble fragments and demolished building rubble rather than working from finished drawings. He replaced the site's non-native planting with species indigenous to Attica, olive chief among them, and the result is now considered one of the twentieth century's most significant works of landscape architecture, studied by architecture schools well beyond Greece. None of this makes the trees themselves ancient. Most of what visitors walk through is roughly seventy years old, deliberately planted rather than inherited, a different kind of remarkable than this list's older entries but a genuine one, a hillside redesigned as a single artwork, with the Acropolis framed through the branches from angles Pikionis chose on purpose. The paths pass the so-called Prison of Socrates and the Monument of Philopappos at the summit. Entry to the hill is free and unrestricted, at any hour.