Kala Pigadia, Leonard Cohen's neighbourhood

In 1960 a young Canadian poet arrived on Hydra with little money and a new typewriter. Leonard Cohen bought a whitewashed house in the upper town with a small inheritance, and for much of the decade he lived there on and off with the Norwegian Marianne Ihlen and her young son, writing poems and novels and, increasingly, songs. 'So Long, Marianne' grew out of those years, and he said that the telephone wires strung across the island gave him the first line of 'Bird on the Wire'.

Cohen was not the first. The Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift had come in 1955 with their children and lived here for almost a decade, writing books about island life that brought others after them. Around them gathered a shifting crowd of painters, poets and drifters from Scandinavia, Britain and America, who met in the harbour cafés in the evenings and lived on almost nothing, in houses with no electricity and water carried up from the wells.

That world had faded by the 1970s, but the island never quite let go of it. The houses are still white, the lanes still carry no cars, and on a summer night you can still hear a guitar from a terrace somewhere above the steps.