A modest white house on a stepped lane two minutes' walk up from the harbour, hidden behind a tall blue door and a fig tree. From the outside it looks like any of a dozen 18th-century captains' houses on the same slope — there is no plaque, no museum, no signage. It is private property and there is nothing inside to see; the appeal is purely as a piece of literary geography.
Leonard Cohen first arrived on Hydra in April 1960 and over the next two decades wrote much of his most enduring work in or around this house. The scene he was part of — Australian writer Charmian Clift, her husband George Johnston, a loose international set of poets, painters, and runaways — gave Hydra a creative reputation that has clung to it ever since. The cafes around the harbour where they drank, especially Roloi (the Clock Cafe) and Lagoudera, are still trading.