Hydra Town, the harbour of captains and artists

From the deck of the incoming catamaran the town looks like a theatre: tier upon tier of houses rising from the water to a ridge of bare rock, all of them facing you. The boat swings into the harbour, the mules are waiting at the quay with their bright saddle cloths, and within a minute you understand that the island moves at walking pace. Luggage goes up on a mule or a hand cart; people go up on foot.

The houses tell the story of Hydra's fortune. In the late eighteenth century the island's ship-owners grew rich carrying grain and running the naval blockades of the Napoleonic wars, and they built themselves fortified mansions of grey limestone on the two flanks of the harbour, with thick walls, cisterns for rainwater and windows that look out to sea. When the Greek War of Independence broke out in 1821, those same families turned their merchant ships into a war fleet. The most famous of the mansions, that of Lazaros Kountouriotis, is open as a museum, and in summer you can climb up to it from the western side of the harbour.

On the waterfront itself, the white marble clock tower belongs to the monastery of the Dormition, whose cloister is now the island's cathedral and the seat of its small ecclesiastical museum. A few steps away a white neoclassical building houses the Historical Archives-Museum, with the papers and relics of the revolutionary fleet. At both ends of the harbour bronze and iron cannons still point out over the water from the old batteries.

Then there is the other Hydra, the one of artists. The painter Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika grew up in his family's mansion here and brought friends from all over Europe in the 1930s; the Athens School of Fine Arts opened a branch in a captain's mansion; in the 1960s a group of foreign writers and musicians, Leonard Cohen among them, made the island their home. Today the old municipal slaughterhouse on the cliff west of the harbour is the summer project space of the DESTE Foundation, and every July and August the lanes fill with gallery openings.