Kea IslandCountry: GreeceArea: 148 km²Time zone: GMT +2

Kea Island, or Tzia, is home to several shipwrecks including the Titanic’s sister ship HMHS Britannic, which sank in 1916 and lies on the seabed to the north of the island.

According to the Greek philosopher Herakleides, Kea Island used to be known as Υδρούσa (hydrousa), “a place rich in water”. Mineral springs poured from cracks in the ground and from the backs of chilly, damp caves, and the ancient Greeks believed that each was attended by a protective Naiad in the form of a lovely woman. However, the story goes, the gods were jealous of the nymphs’ beauty, and sent a lion to the island to terrorise them; the nymphs fled to nearby Karistos and the island dried up.

Kea is a small, arid island located southeast of the Greek mainland, the Cycladic island closest to Athens. Although it’s only an hour on a ferry, it’s still quiet and underpopulated. It takes the shape of an almond, which have been cultivated on the island since classical antiquity, or the 4th century BC, when around 15,000 people lived here.  Now, the population drops to around 1,000 in the winter. One road circles the island, which takes about an hour to drive. Athenians with boats like to sail over in the summer on a Friday night and anchor on one of the island’s 56 beaches for the weekend, many of which aren’t accessible by car. There’s a general unpopulated feeling: the main town, Ioulis, is located inland from the coast because of a historic fear of pirates, and its largest building, perched at the crest of its hill, is vast and empty. Through its broken wooden doors you can see where the roof has fallen in; tiles lie smashed on the floor.

This overlooked island has this summer become the host to One&Only Kea Island, a new resort occupying a spit that looks back towards the mainland. The resort was designed by John Heah to resemble a Greek hill village, and so mirrors Ioulis: a large building sits at the top of the peak, and the houses cascade down the slopes. The main building holds a tall, light-filled atrium, which contains several mature trees, around which sparrows wheel in and out. The resort consists of individual villas, each of which has a stone fireplace for the night and a gobsmacking view over the Aegean by day. Petroula Tatsopoulou, an archeologist who has been involved with the resort since it began to be excavated from the hillside, tells me later that the ancient Greeks didn’t think of the sea as a barrier between islands, but as a vast connective tissue; they would take to the sea as unthinkingly as they might walk over a hill. Here, it surrounds the resort, so that every building opens to a vast, glittering blue vista.

The main hall of the hotel’s reception space, which looks out to sea in front. Under the stairs sits a cool pool of water which reflects the light.

Kea is exceptionally quiet. In the hills, in the evening, often the only audible noise is the tonk of goat bells and, far away, a dog barking. On the coast, you can sit and watch the light dimming over the sea, punctuated by the slow process of a trawler or two. Sometimes it feels like being in a different era; one day, from the car, I saw a man leading three laden donkeys across a hill, trailed by a slinking grubby white dog. Yet, the island is entirely covered with the traces of human inhabitation, as archeologist Petroula points out as we drive to the start of a hike to the ancient city of Karthea. The terraces that line the hills are formed by dry stone walls and represent centuries of agricultural labour; not one inch of the island is without them, and they often run right down to where the island meets the sea. Kea is more mountainous than other Cycladic islands, which makes it more difficult to cultivate, these terraces were constructed to provide level fields and improve irrigation. “Every single rock,” Petroula says, leaning over the back seat, “has been placed by the hands of men.”

These terraces, which would have grown wheat, cereals, barley, olives, vines, figs, pomegranates, almonds and olives, and supported small-scale domestic animal agriculture, are now mostly unused; when we visited in October the island was a rich orange-brown. The grass is dry and the leaves on the sacred oaks which cover the island are crispy round the edges. But on my walk with Petroula to Karthea, one of the island’s ancient city-states, we find a spring with a profusion of small-leaved fragrant wild mint at its base – a remnant of Kea’s water-abundant past, and a touch of the sacred that makes the Naiads seem not too far away.

The sea squill is an onion-like bulb which sends up a long white flower. It grew in profusion on the island after extensive wildfires a few years ago and after drought; at New Year the Greeks hang sea squills outside houses to symbolise rebirth. They are also poisonous, and are used as an organic rat poison.

“We are all pagans in Greece,” Petroula tells me happily, as we’re standing in a small white church dedicated to Saint Michael. Greece was one of the first countries through which early Christianity spread from the Middle East, with Paul travelling through the country to preach and seed churches. Christian figures often overlapped and overlaid on pre-existing religious figures; Petroula tells me that the Virgin Mary is associated with the myrtle tree throughout Greece, and her festival is held in September, when the myrtle flowers. Myrtle had an ancient connection to Aphrodite, goddess of love and pleasure. In Crete, Petroula tells me, there is a monastery built next to an ancient myrtle which is supposed to hold an icon of Panagia Mirtidiotissa, Virgin Mary of Myrtle. Arguably, the Virgin Mary also replaced the Naiads – one of her Greek names is Zoodochos Pege (the life-giving spring).

The hiking paths that criss-cross the island are old paths between springs; the necessity of finding water structured the whole of ancient society. Petroula tells me that ancient inscriptions have been found with careful instructions on how to preserve springs, dedicated to Artemis and Apollo. In Greek antiquity, there was much worship of springs. “We personally haven’t felt as if our lives depend on water,” says Petroula, “But now, we do.” In 2022, the heatwave in the UK was so severe that reservoirs dried up and the houses of South London, which are built on clay, slumped as the trees that line the streets extended their roots further into the earth. In Greece, heatwaves have become regular; in 2022 wildfires raged across the islands. In July of this year, temperatures regularly exceeded 40°C.

Water as metaphor must be balanced against its reality, as a scarce resource in a warming climate. In 2022, the Municipality of Kea and the ​​Association of Friends of Kea met in a lecture room to discuss the supply of control system for the island’s water networks. In the open meeting, they talked about the need to support the supply and installation of remote monitoring equipment in existing and new water supply infrastructures, as well as upgrading the automatic system readings. All of the language is much less romantic than that of the myths but it describes a continuous relationship: people must honour water with sacrifice and surveillance to prevent it from drying up.

One of two free water vending machines on the island.

One&Only Kea Island combines a religious attitude to water with careful sourcing. At the hotel, secular shrines to water are everywhere, often outside between the buildings and in the main hall, occupying the spaces on the ground where the building’s shadow falls. Inside, shallow pools surround the stairs. Three large stone spheres are balanced in the water. But the hotel also has come about through ten years of careful negotiation with both the landscape and people of Kea, with water supply a key concern. The resort recycles its irrigation water through a treatment plant instead of relying on the already-pressured local supply, and the herbs and grasses everywhere throughout the site are native – sage and rosemary – and not water-greedy.

The lion who chased away the Naiads and caused the springs to dry up is never too far away. Kea’s most famous archeological feature is a statue of a lion, who reclines near its largest town Ioulis, carved from a single shale rock. He shares a smile with some of the statues in the Acropolis Museum in Athens that stand in the upper hall. At some point, their serious faces break into unconvincing grins, the “Archaic smile” that entered in to sculpture in the 6th century. The Lion of Kea shares this strange smile, though his is dopier – a disconcerting smile for what is really a disturbing monument to the spectre of drought.

The busiest time on the island is the summer, but early autumn is a good time to visit the Cyclades, as is the early spring when the brown hillsides explode with wildflowers.

Myths, says Petroula, are “encoded knowledge”: information transmitted from generation to generation through stories. But myths develop new vernaculars for successive retellings, and are always open to reshaping. Alekos Fassianos, one of Greece’s best-known artists, lived on Kea. He painted faces in stern profile, but with liberated, waving hair and exuberant hands, often playing music. He died in 2022, and curator Sotiria Antonopoulou takes us to his studio, where paintbrushes lie on the desk as though he’s just walked out of the door. Sotiria leads us on a walk around Ioulis, and his paintings are everywhere – on doorways, walls, outside shops, built into gates and perched on the tops of houses. Fassianos often used a deep blue pigment to fill in human outlines, a reflection perhaps of how on Kea, the sea seems to not only surround you, but enter into you. Here, water’s life-sustaining and elemental magic is as potent as when the island belonged to the Naiads. .