Just offshore – you can walk out to it at low tide – is this tiny island. It looks like an ideal artist’s or writer’s retreat, which indeed it once was: novelist Paul Bowles wrote The Spider’s House here in the 1950s. The island was developed in the 1920s by the French Count de Mauny Talvande who perched his mansion on the tiny rock. You can stay or dine on the island with advance planning; five staff are allocated to cater for your stay.