Lee Durrell, 76, who was Gerald's second wife, is the figurehead of a campaign to halt the £88.5 million development of the last untouched corner of the island, on which his legacy is still celebrated.
Last week it marked the centenary of his birth with an outdoor play of My Family and Other Animals and a talk by Durrell at the Corfu Literary Festival.
A quarter of the northeastern headland of Erimitis, meaning "hermit", has this year changed hands.
It was leased out by the debt-ridden Greek government more than a decade ago, one of the assets worth billions that it offloaded to pay back its EU and IMF bailouts.
The new holder of the 99-year lease is Calamos, the American asset management company founded by the billionaire John Calamos, the son of Greek greengrocers who migrated to Chicago. It paid about $30 million for just under 500 acres of land, on which it plans to build a hotel and villas designed by the British architect Sir David Chipperfield.
A finger of hawthorn, orchids, wetlands and thin white beaches, Erimitis looks much as it did before even the Venetians arrived: it is remote enough that they didn't plant their ubiquitous olive groves. Otters and dolphins love it, as do migratory birds, spiders and insects, what Gerald used to call "little brown jobs".
Perhaps most valuably, Mediterranean monk seals have been regularly spotted frolicking in its caves. They are among the most endangered sea mammals in the world, with only about 900 thought to survive.
"It's a complete jewel, it's a complete gem," said Durrell, an American who met Gerald as a junior researcher in the 1970s, pointing the place out on a map. She lives on the island full-time, among foxes and buzzards, with her partner, Colin Stevenson.
She is not sure Gerald ventured as far as Erimitis on his childhood walks around the island, but the family would have passed it when going by boat from his brother, the novelist Lawrence's house at Kalami, on the east coast, to a lake they liked visiting on the north side.
"They were constantly getting off and swimming and looking at stuff and all of that," Durrell said.
When she and Gerald began visiting Corfu in the 1980s, after coming to shoot a TV programme, they would take a boat around the same way. "And Gerry would turn his back on the developments, and then, when there were no developments, we would say, 'Look, no, it's clear. Coast is clear.' Literally, turn around," she said. "I'm sure that's when he saw Erimitis."
Simon Karythis, an ecologist who runs the Ionian Environment Foundation, a local charity, said Erimitis was "probably the last bit of the island Gerald would recognise", with its distinctive flora and fauna, much of which crosses over the narrow strait from Albania.
Karythis, born on the island to an English mother and Corfiot father, said thousands of yachts and sailing boats destroy wildlife by ripping up seagrass with their anchors.
The local government says it wants to encourage quality, high-spending tourism, rather than quantity. A permanent population of about 100,000 hosted almost two million visitors last year, with flight arrivals up by a third since 2019.
Along the eastern side of the island there is no stretch that isn't built on. Until you reach Erimitis. Locals in the area have been protesting since 2012, on several occasions lying down in front of bulldozers and lodging years of appeals in the courts, including Greece's supreme court.
One man who is at every protest is Kostas Sarakinos, 59, born and bred in Kassiopi, a beautiful coastal village next to Erimitis, where he runs a bar. Having studied at Brighton Polytechnic, as it was, he has worked in tourism as far away as the Caribbean.
"I came back here not because I didn't have options to live elsewhere but because I love it," he said. "I love my island. And I think that [protesting] is obligatory for me and for my ethics.
"Any f***er that comes and creates such problems, you will find me against you."
Each of the appeals has been dismissed but apart from a stretch of road built by the previous developer, now all but grown back over, Erimitis remains untouched.
The previous owners, another American company, NCH Capital, had plans to build a 90-bedroom five-star hotel, 40 villas, restaurants, shops and a marina. Despite winning permissions, it never followed through on them.
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Calamos is understood to say its plans are smaller, more environmentally sensitive and include no marina, but it has not made them public. The company has been contacted for comment about its plans.
One of the company's public faces is the Greek-Nigerian basketball star Giannis Antetokounmpo, known as "The Greek Freak", who has given his name to a Calamos fund investing in companies "realising positive social and environmental benefits", according to its website. These include Apple, Alphabet, which owns Google, and Microsoft.
The campaign to stop development has influential figures of its own, including the British financiers Ben Goldsmith, a rewilding poster boy who was until 2022 a board member for Defra, and founded the Ionian Environment Foundation; Rob Lucas, chief executive of the investment firm CVC Capital Partners; and Nat Rothschild, son of the late Jacob Rothschild, whose family has a seafront villa with a private beach near Erimitis where the King and Queen have stayed.
So many wealthy Brits have houses on it that the northeast coast of Corfu is known as Kensington-on-Sea. When the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, visited Corfu in 2020 to officially launch the Erimitis development, about 200 mainly British property owners wrote to him suggesting it would cause "widespread dismay amongst foreign friends of Greece around the world" and "destroy value for its neighbours". Rothschild called the NCH plans "a total disaster" which took Corfu back to "1970s-style mass development".
Supporters have pointed to the development creating several hundred jobs. Critics say Corfu's hotels and restaurants have staff shortages as it is.
Developers say most of Erimitis will remain unspoilt under their plans. Karythis said building only on part of it would be "destructive", by breaking up the ecosystem.
Lee Durrell said the Greek government has "an amazing opportunity" to turn down the development plans. She said: "I think we should try to turn around and make it positive. For Greece, for Corfu to show the world that it's perfectly possible to say no to development when they've already got everything else developed. Let's just take a stand. Let's just say, enough is enough."
She has recently brought out a book of some of Gerald's unfinished autobiographical writing. If he were still here, would he be championing Erimitis?
In the 1960s he wrote to the then prime minister complaining about tourism in Corfu, which he later described as "an acute and probably terminal case of leprosy".
"It's funny, it's interesting you ask that," Durrell said. "He was not much of a campaigner. I think he just liked to be a little bit quiet ... privately he would very much have railed against [the developers]."