Hydra
Hydra has no cars, no scooters, no motorised vehicles of any kind. Luggage from the ferry is carried up to the hotels by mule, and the row of donkey-drivers waiting on the quay each midday is the working solution, not the photograph. There are also water taxis to the more distant villages and swimming spots. Plan a soft suitcase rather than a hard shell, and tip the driver who carries yours.
The grey stone mansions ringing the harbour were built in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Hydriot shipping captains who had grown wealthy on Mediterranean trade and on running the British blockade during the Napoleonic Wars. When the Greek War of Independence broke out in 1821, those same families turned their fleet to the cause; Hydra effectively financed and crewed a substantial part of the revolutionary navy under the admiral Andreas Miaoulis. The Historical Archives Museum on the harbour holds the logbooks.
In 1960 Leonard Cohen bought a small white house up in the lanes for fifteen hundred dollars. Marianne Ihlen lived there with him through much of the decade, and several of his early albums and the novel Beautiful Losers were written here. The Athens School of Fine Arts maintains a campus on the harbour, and the summer exhibitions of the DESTE Foundation in a former municipal slaughterhouse on the headland are the most serious art programme in the Saronic. None of this is staged for visitors, which is the point.
The walking is excellent. The path up to the Profitis Ilias monastery, above the town, takes about an hour each way and rewards with the cleanest harbour view on the island. Swimming is at flat rocks rather than beaches: Spilia and Kamini in the town, or a water taxi to Bisti or Vlychos for the day. Hydra needs three nights, properly done. A weekend day-trip from Athens does not show you the island.
House Notes
Arrival
Helicopter from Athens, around half an hour; iFly Air Charters operate the transfer. There is no airfield on Hydra — the helipad sits on Kivotos, an uninhabited islet northwest of Molos, and a water taxi takes the final stretch into the harbour. The Hellenic Seaways Flying Dolphin from Piraeus is the alternative, two hours via Poros.
The address
Bratsera, in a stone building of 1860 that was a working sponge factory, founded by the Hydriot Nickolaos Verveniotis. The name comes from the bratsera — the place where Hydra’s sponge fleets once embarked. The restored building holds 25 rooms around a pool, with reclaimed materials and beech wood in the suites; one carries hand-painted friezes dating from 1756.
The mansion
The Lazaros Koundouriotis Historical Mansion, on the west side of the harbour, has been a museum since 2001 as an annex of the National Historical Museum. The ground floor keeps the family heirlooms as the last descendant Pandelis Koundouriotis lived among them. In the old cellars, a small gallery hangs Periklis Vyzantios and his son Konstantinos Vyzantios.
Tetsis at home
Panagiotis Tetsis, the Hydriot painter and Academy of Athens member who died in 2016, donated his grandparents’ house in 2007 to the Historical and Ethnological Society. One aisle of the ground floor was the family candle manufactory and grocery-tavern. Visits are arranged through the Koundouriotis Mansion: 10:00 to 16:00 daily, 25 March through 31 October.
The slaughterhouse
The DESTE Foundation Project Space occupies the island’s old slaughterhouse on the headland, which the municipality granted to the foundation in 2008. DESTE was established in 1983 by the collector Dakis Joannou; its standing premise here is to hand the bare stone building to a single artist each year — Jeff Koons, Maurizio Cattelan, Kiki Smith among them — for work conceived for the room itself. The space keeps to the warmer months.
The cathedral
The Cathedral of the Dormition stands at the middle of the harbour, beneath the clock tower — a domed basilica raised in the mid-17th century, rebuilt by Venetian architects after an earthquake, with two marble bell towers and a marble iconostasis inside. It ceased to be a monastery in 1833; the cloisters around it now hold the town hall. The small Ecclesiastical and Byzantine Museum within keeps vestments and 18th-century icons, the Unwithered Rose of 1774 among them.
Omilos
Omilos sits just outside the harbour mouth on the way to the Spilia rocks, a low house built over the sea on the site of the old fuel depot that became the Lagoudera nightclub. Kostas Acheilas and Lisa Bartsioka took the abandoned shell in 2006; the kitchen, under Aristotelis Anastasakis, is modern Greek and Mediterranean. The terrace is the smarter table on the island — whitewashed, minimal, the water under the railing.
Limnioniza
Limnioniza, on Hydra’s southern coast, is a secluded pebble bay reached by water taxi from the harbour. The bay is small and protective, the water emerald and clear; sunbeds, umbrellas, and a snack kiosk on the shore. Unmarked by the crowds that thin the closer beaches.
The convent
The Hydra convent of Agia Efpraxia, founded in 1821 during the War of Independence, sits at an altitude of 452 metres — 3 kilometres uphill from the town, then 150 metres along a side trail off the path to the Profitis Ilias monastery. The few nuns who keep it are known for their handiwork. An hour’s climb through the pines, or by donkey.
The kitchen
Téchnē at Avlaki Bay, opened in 2016 by Jason Barios and the chef Yannis Michalopoulos. Michalopoulos came home from London, where he had been head chef of two restaurants, to set up the kitchen. Modern Greek cooking in a courtyard next to the sea.