Hydra

There are no cars or scooters on Hydra. Luggage goes up from the harbour on the backs of mules, and the old houses face inward behind high grey walls, built by ship-owners who had reason to expect the wrong kind of visitor. Painters and writers came in the 1950s and 1960s; Leonard Cohen bought a house here in September 1960 with a $1,500 bequest from his grandmother. The art world now arrives every June, for a slaughterhouse.

Stay

Institutions

Orloff (Hydra Town) — A house of 1796, built on the ruins of a convent and named for the Orlov revolt of the period. The Kladakis family lived in it for more than eighty years before it became a hotel in 1986. There are six rooms and two suites around courtyards, and no balconies: the walls were built to keep things out, and the views are all inward.

Bratsera (Hydra Town) — Nikolaos Verveniotis's sponge factory of 1860, named after the mother ship that the sponge fleets sailed out with. The hotel says its garden pool is the only one of its kind on the island.