Golden hour is giving way to dusk and the bars in the main town on Mykonos are lighting up. “It feels like we’re on Mount Olympus, looking down on the hoi polloi,” my partner, Mike, jokes from the sofa-sized lounger on our hillside hotel terrace at Deos, a five-star resort that is a comfortable distance from the sundowner crowds at the bars of Little Venice.

This view of the sugar-cubed harbour surrounded by 16th-century windmills from above St Vasileios Church became famous as the image on the island’s first postcard, explains Alex, a guest wrangler at Deos. If not for the cruise ship with the dimensions of a sideways skyscraper that has just dropped anchor outside the bay, you could kid yourself that much remains the same.

Of course, time hasn’t just marched on here, but positively sprinted. “Life in Mykonos has changed more in these past 60 years than it did in the prior 3,000 years,” the photographer Robert McCabe remarked when he published Mykonos: Portrait of a Vanished Era, a collection of black-and-white shots that he took in 1955, including this very view. The day he arrived, in the July of that year, there were only 15 visitors to what he called this “magical quiet island with one 12-passenger bus and a plethora of donkeys”.

Now known as a playground for the rich, famous — Jessica Alba was spotted off the island at the end of last month on board Zeus, the superyacht that Elon Musk chartered for a holiday here in 2022 — and a million or so other assorted visitors a year, Mykonos has a reputation for hedonistic excess that puts off as many people as it attracts. But the magical quiet that McCabe described is very much what the island’s latest luxury hotel is trying to recapture.