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Hydra Island is now ‘live’ on the Greek National Cadastre but … with quite a few errors.


Today I’d like to talk to you about the change from the land registry office to the replacement digital system called the National Cadastre. More specifically how this affects Hydra property owners and what action they must take, now, to protect their interests.


Over the last 12 years, Greece has implemented multiple digital platforms, working towards merging them all together so that gathering information about a property can be done from one place online and very quickly.


One of the platforms is called the National Cadastre (Ktimatologio).


The transition involves completely merging the records from 392 former local registries into one centralized digital system.


This is a huge undertaking and the transition has been phased in, so both the old and new systems will still be referred to until all 392 registries and been converted.


Nearly 2 years ago, the content of the Hydra archives, held in the tiny cloister of the Hydra Cathedral that served as our Land Registry Office, were transferred over to Piraeus for data-capture and put on the new digital/computer system. That information transfer has been completed and Hydra is now available on the new system.


  • The Cadastre provides the same services as the old registry office but it’s MUCH quicker at retrieving the information needed.

  • It’s a Parcel-Based System: which means instead of organizing property files under the name of the owner (the old method), the new system ties all rights, boundaries, and restrictions to a unique 12-digit cadastral code (KAEK) which is attached directly to the property.

  • Hydra property owners can now login to view and print their own files, if they’re feeling brave. But for the moment, because the Hydra data has so many errors and omissions, you will need to use your lawyer to check the cadastre record against the old system, which you can’t access, to correct any mistakes made during conversion from paper to digital.

  • The professionals (lawyers, notaries, engineers and debt collection agencies) can now handle Hydra transactions, make information corrections, add missing documents, check property status, and retrieve digital deeds and diagrams directly via the Cadastre Platform within minutes rather than days.

  • But do note that contracts signed from 2024 onwards are not yet fully registered because there is still quite a backlog.


To give context, we need to consider what information was held by the land registry office that is now on the cadastre. The land registry office held paper copies of your title (the deeds to your property to prove you own it) and much more. In the past, lawyers would physically come to Hydra to visit the office to do a manual search in the archive records to find outstanding mortgages, unpaid loans, any outstanding court cases, linked to a property etc. It’s all of this information information that is now handled digitally by the Cadastra.


But lawyers are reporting that for Hydra, there are errors and omissions. For example, there might have been a mortgage against the property, but even though the mortgage was paid in full, the paperwork to say it was is not shown on the new cadastre. There are many other similar errors that need to be corrected.


This isn’t surprising because a machine scanner can only reproduce the information that it can ‘read’ off the paper it’s given. I know from my time spent dropping off documents and collecting them from Hydra’s old office, that often documents were barely legible, folded repeatedly and often had coffee mug stains on them. And sometimes it would take days to track down a document because it had been misfiled. Often the documents had handwritten notes added to badly typed pages. Or worse, older documents pre 2000 were mainly handwritten often in really difficult to read stylised script that humans had trouble reading let alone a computer. So when doing it’s job, the scanner has done it’s best, but either rejected some documents or guessed or approximated. This is why there are so many errors.


So what do you need to do?


It’s really important that Hydra property owners should speak to their lawyer immediately to make sure that their new cadastre record is 100% accurate and complete. And if not, to get it corrected and up-to-date as soon as possible while the old papers still exist. It’s not a trick to get you to pay more money to the government, but your way of making sure the government are getting it right!


Now, many Hydra property owners, will be very reluctant to bother and will dismiss dealing with their record on the Cadastre as another bit of annoying bureaucracy. But like the Digital ID that is compulsory for any property transfer, the Cadastre record is also necessary. The old and new systems won’t run in tandem for very long as paper takes a lot of expensive storage. So in the very near future if your Cadastre number refers to incorrect or incomplete information you could risk not being able to sell or pass on your property! Please don’t put it off, it’s worth checking now to make your life easier in the future.


As I said, you need to be brave because you might find alarming errors, but if you want to see what your record looks like, follow these steps to get a printout of your Greek Cadastre record.

If you need more information please contact me and if you need a lawyer to help you get your Cadastre record 100% correct, I can refer you to lawyers who are already doing this work.


Until my next update, I wish you all the best.


Good Bye for now, regards Kelsey

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