Step off the catamaran at Hydra harbour and you will immediately notice what is missing. No taxis waiting at the dock. No mopeds threading through the crowd. No engine noise of any kind, except perhaps a distant municipal truck collecting rubbish — the only internal combustion vehicles the law permits on the island. What you hear instead is footsteps on stone, the soft percussion of donkey hooves on the stepped lanes rising from the waterfront, and the particular quiet of a place that has chosen to keep the twentieth century at arm's length. Hydra banned cars before most islands had reason to consider the question, and the island has not regretted it.
The harbour at Hydra is a crescent of pale stone buildings curving around blue water, with whitewashed houses rising up the hillsides on either side until the lanes become too steep to follow from the waterfront. Restaurants and cafes line the quay; galleries occupy the ground floors of old sea-captain's mansions. The scene is crowded in summer — Hydra is deservedly one of the most popular day trips from Athens, and the hydrofoils arrive from Piraeus, some 37 nautical miles away, in around 90 minutes. But the day trippers leave on the last fast boats, and the harbour quietens into something quite different by evening: a few dozen guests at the taverna tables, the click of donkey-shoes on the cobbles as the last loads are delivered uphill, the lights of the Peloponnesian coast visible across the two-kilometre channel.
Getting around the island without motorised transport is not the hardship it sounds. The inhabited area of Hydra town is compact enough that almost everything is within walking distance of the harbour — the mansions-turned-museums, the churches, the shops, the cafes serving ouzo and coffee on the waterfront. For distances that feel longer than a walk, two options exist: donkeys and water taxis. Both congregate at the harbour. The water taxis quote fixed fares posted on a sign at the dock, in Greek only, ranging from around €9 for the short crossing to Kamini, the quieter village about a kilometre to the west, to €120 for a circuit of the whole island. The donkeys are the more picturesque option for deliveries and luggage, and the Wikivoyage contributors who documented the island offered their own practical warning: watch your step on the lanes, because the island's environmental transport policy produces a predictable by-product underfoot.
Hydra does not offer sandy beaches. The island's shore is limestone, worn smooth in some places and rough in others, and the swimming is done from rocks rather than sand. The most accessible spot near the main harbour is Spilia, on the western edge of town in the Kamini district — a rocky area fitted with a few stairs and flat ledges for sunbathing, where you enter the water via ladders set into the sea wall. The water is clean and usually calm, the view is beautiful, and sea urchins lurk on the wall below the waterline: awareness is required. Twenty minutes further west along the coast road is Vlihos, a pebble beach with chairs for hire and two tavernas a few steps back from the water. The 45-minute walk from the harbour along the clifftop road is widely considered worth the distance. Local daredevils leap from a cliff on the road to Kamini; visitors are advised not to attempt this without knowing the depth.
Hydra's character is most legible in the streets above the waterfront. Steep stepped alleys of grey stone wind upward between whitewashed walls, branching and narrowing until they reach small courtyard churches, views across the Argolic Gulf, or simply a dead end with a cat sleeping in the shade. The old mansions of the sea captains — the Kountouriotis family, the Tombazis family, the Tsamados family — are accessible as branch museums, restored to show the furniture and domestic life of Hydra's commercial golden age. The Tombazis mansion houses a branch of the Athens School of Fine Arts. The Tsamados mansion became a maritime academy. Walking past the one that belonged to the Tsamados family on the hill, now the Old Carpet Factory, it is worth remembering that all of this stone and wealth came from the sea, from ships running blockades and grain routes between the Black Sea and Italy, before the steam engine made sails obsolete and Hydra's moment passed.
A National Geographic Traveler panel of 522 experts rated Hydra the highest of any Greek island in 2007, eleventh worldwide, citing its "integrity of place" — which is another way of saying that Hydra has not yet dissolved into the generic Mediterranean resort experience. The judgment holds. But integrity of place is most visible after the last fast catamaran leaves for Piraeus. The tavernas in Kamini, down the coast from the main port, are grizzled and local in a way the harbour restaurants are not; the seafood is actually local when it is offered, and the prices reflect that. Stay the night in one of the guest houses or small hotels — some of which require climbing flights of stairs to reach, so ask before booking if this matters — and the island that was packed at midday becomes, by ten o'clock, something closer to what it must have been before the hydrofoils arrived: an island of stone and sea, with donkeys sleeping in the courtyards and the lights of the mainland glowing faintly across the channel.
Hydra island sits at 37.350°N, 23.467°E in the Saronic Gulf. The main harbour opens to the north shore of the island, clearly visible from the air as a crescent indent in the rocky coastline. The island is elongated east-west, approximately 19 km long, with steep terrain and no level ground for any airstrip. The Peloponnesian coastline of the Argolic Peninsula lies roughly 2 km to the north. Nearest major airport: LGAV (Athens International Eleftherios Venizelos), approximately 65 km north. Piraeus port, the departure point for all passenger ferries, is 37 nautical miles north-northwest.