The tau lepton plays a crucial role in the LHC research program and in particular in the Higgs phenomenology. The tau decay mode is the only fermionic mode currently observable and it will remain the most sensitive one for the foreseeable future. In this talk, I will review the strategy employed by ATLAS to detect the tau lepton and measure its properties. I will present recent results in BSM searches with taus using the pp collisions collected by ATLAS in 2015 and I will discuss Higgs measurement prospects with the Run2 dataset.