Welcome to Hydra, the Greek island that said no thanks to cars

Looming into view, as the ferry from Athens approaches its harbour, Hydra seems like any other island at first. Fluttering Greek flags wave me into port, white houses gleam in the sunshine, all of them spilling down the hillside towards the calm sea. I can hear glasses clinking in harbour bars and see B&Bs owners beside the dock waiting to whisk visitors back to their premises. 

Except these locals aren’t waiting, as they normally do in the Greek islands, in their cars. Hydra — off the east coast of the Peloponnese, 90 minutes by boat from Piraeus — is car-free. Even bicycles are banned, thanks to a 1950s law that sought to keep it as it’s always been — a labyrinth of alleys to be explored on foot, or aided by the island’s mules.

Flashing me a grin, Petros Feimi, the porter sent by the Orloff Hotel, my accommodation in the town of Hydra, tips my suitcase into his cart and trundles off with it along the cobbles, weaving around sandal-clad tourists, mules shifting idly from hoof to hoof and cats snoozing in the sun. He leads me uphill, like a pied piper, fielding ‘kalimera’s (‘good day’s) as he goes. Petros is strong — not even running my luggage up 30-odd steps can make him break a sweat.

“You get used to it,” says Harriet Jarman when I meet her the next morning, after walking through town to her stables, Harriet’s Hydra Horses. Her eight steeds are busy chewing noisily on fresh hay. “You see elderly women carrying three bags of shopping,” she says. “My son had to learn to walk at 18 months because I couldn’t carry him.”

Harriet was 10 when she and her mum moved from Buckinghamshire to Hydra. “We came on holiday and loved it, so we stayed,” she says simply, grooming Melina — a dappled grey rescue from the Peloponnese — under a gum tree. A life-long rider, Harriet was the first on this island of equines — there are over 1,000 of them here, all working animals — to offer horse-riding to visitors, in 2014.

“It’s a lot easier to see the island from the saddle,” she says. “There are lots of stairs and ups and downs here. On a horse, you can sit back and enjoy the view.” Harriet takes visitors along cliff-side mule tracks and up to monasteries in the mountains. “It’s 50-50 whether they let us in now. Before the pandemic, they’d invite us in for coffee.” 

The next day, I catch sight of Harriet as I’m walking back from a beach swim, leading her group of horses along Hydra’s sole cliff path, which unfurls either side of town along a five-mile stretch of the north coast. Hydra is fairly barren with few roads; your only options to reach some of the coves is to sail or walk.

Boats are best for the furthest beaches, beyond the path: Bisti, a tiny cove backed by a rare grove of trees towards Hydra’s western tip; and Agios Nikolaos, a calm, gulf-like indent on the southwest coast set between mountains. But closer to town, walking becomes part of the experience. 

This morning, I’d started out with a boat ride to Plakes beach, around two miles west of town, for my early dip. Now, I’m strolling along a ruddy dirt path that runs east back to town. It leads behind cottages and grand painted mansions built by wealthy shipowners in Hydra’s heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries — the Orloff Hotel is one such building, dating from 1798. Taxi boats skim across the water, the thumb of the Peloponnese hovering in the distance out to sea. 

I pass a blue-domed church, then a cliffside amphitheatre — boho Hydra’s cultural scene peaked in the 1960s, when the likes of Leonard Cohen lived here — before dipping down to Vlychos beach. My efforts are rewarded with a feast of garlic-marinated anchovies and watermelon and feta salad at Enalion, a beachside restaurant set between acacia trees. Without cars, it’s so quiet I swear I hear the butterfly that lands on my table as I finish my goblet of Peloponnese red.

Following an afternoon on Vlychos beach, snoozing in the sun like one of those Hydriot cats, I head back to town, across a humped bridge and up the cliffside, watching the Peloponnese coastline unfurl across the water. The path lifts as gently as a Leonard Cohen song, past the tiny harbour of Kamini, where fishing boats bob; up again to a bench dedicated to Cohen; and past the cliffside restaurants marking the entrance to Hydra town. The sun is setting, the sea is flushing pink and alleyways of whitewashed houses spiral invitingly off from the waterfront. I’d worried that a car-free island might turn a break into a chore, but on Hydra, the journey really does make the experience.