BEYOND THE SEA

Take the ferry to Hydra, a car-free idyll where peace, food, music, and love weave a seductive Hellenic spell.

- Juliet Nicolson

To visit Hydra is to travel Tardis-like to a time long ago, to a place where the complete absence of motorised wheels lends an unmatchable peace. Hydra belongs to the Saronic group of islands and lies about an hour and a half across the sea from Athens. After a brief stop at the pretty island of Paros, our ferry approached a horseshoe-shaped harbor humming with cafés, delectable shops selling floaty sundresses, honey, and mouth-watering spinach pies and purring with a thousand indigenous cats. Elegant 18th-century sea captain's houses ring a port dominated by the graceful, golden outline of the town’s clock tower: the long appointed meeting point for lovers and lost children. Steep steps cut into the hills rise up from all three sides of the port, coiling and snaking their way through the narrow, bougainvillea-hung streets.