Troodos in two days: a driving route from Limassol to Kalopanagiotis
Hairpin mountain road descending through pine forest towards a red-roofed Troodos village
A 130 km north-bound mountain route with 4.5 hours of real driving, four painted churches, one waterfall walk and two very different villages to sleep in.
The route in one line, and why you drive it north
Two days works in the mountains only if you stop trying to loop back to where you started. The line that pays off runs north: out of Limassol on the B8 through Trimiklini, up to Platres, over the Troodos square saddle at around 1,700 m, down into the Solea valley for Kakopetria, then west into Marathasa for Pedoulas and Kalopanagiotis. It is roughly 130 km, but budget four and a half hours of moving time across the two days. The B8 and B9 are continuous hairpins where 40 km/h is a realistic average, and getting stuck behind a cement lorry costs ten minutes with no safe overtake.
The reason to run it as a line rather than a circle is that the villages sit in two separate valleys draining opposite sides of the range. Trying to see both from one base means crossing the summit twice a day for nothing. Fill the tank in Limassol or at Trimiklini; the village pumps in Platres, Kakopetria and Pedoulas keep short hours and several shut by 19:00 in winter. From January to mid-March expect snow above 1,400 m, occasional police closure of the summit road, and fog that arrives in fifteen minutes. In summer the mountains run 8-10C cooler than the coast, which is the whole point.
Day 1, 09:00-13:00: Limassol to Platres the slow way
Leave Limassol at 09:00 and you are climbing within twenty minutes. Take the Trimiklini turn rather than the motorway, and at Trimiklini go left for Foini instead of straight up to Platres. Foini is the pottery village: workshops still throw the fat terracotta pitharia storage jars, and the small private pottery museum on the through-road takes twenty minutes and a couple of euro. From Foini it is fifteen minutes of narrow, well-surfaced road to Trooditissa monastery, hidden in pines at 1,300 m. The church is open to visitors outside services, the monks do not want cameras inside, and the car park fills by 11:00 on Sundays.
Roll into Platres for 12:00. The village is a Victorian-era hill station that never quite modernised: stone hotels from the 1930s, a stream, and shops selling rose water, dried figs and zivania in unlabelled bottles. Do not eat in the first place you see on the main road. Walk the loop of the upper village, then commit to lunch at 13:00 by the Caledonia trailhead where trout is farmed on site and served plain with lemon — around €14-18 for a whole fish with salad and bread. Skip Platres in August weekends if you can; Nicosia empties into it and parking becomes a sport.
Day 1, 13:45-18:30: Caledonia Falls and the summit road
Start the Caledonia trail straight after lunch, when the gorge is shaded. It is about 3 km one way, following the Kryos stream up through plane trees and crossing it a dozen times on stepping stones to a 12 m waterfall. Allow 90 minutes up and 50 back down, or park at the top-end trailhead near the Presidential summer residence and walk down first if your knees prefer that order. Trainers are fine in summer; from December to March the stones ice over and the crossings become genuinely slippery. Water bottles, not sandals. There is no cafe at the falls and no phone signal in the bottom third of the gorge.
By 16:30 drive up to Troodos square, park, and take the Artemis trail if you still have legs: a 7 km near-level loop around the flank of Chionistra at 1,850 m, through black pines and juniper, with views south to the Limassol coast on a clear evening. If the day has run long, drive the surfaced road to the summit fence instead, look at the radar domes from below, and settle for the Persephone trail from the square, which is 3 km each way to a cliff-edge viewpoint over the southern foothills. Aim to be off the summit road before dark; deer and stray goats use it at dusk.
Where to sleep on night one
Platres is the obvious base and the right one for night one. The stock is old-school: stone-fronted hotels on the through-road with radiators and lace curtains, a scatter of family-run apartments up the side lanes, and a handful of restored village houses let by the night. Expect €70-110 for a double in a mid-range hotel, breakfast included, dropping under €60 midweek in November and rising above €140 for the fortnight around Orthodox Easter and the first fortnight in August. Rooms with fireplaces get booked out from December to February — ask specifically, because half the listings show a stock photo of one.
The alternative is sleeping at Troodos square itself, 1,700 m up beside the ski lifts. It is bleaker, colder, and closer to the trailheads, which is exactly what you want in January if you are skiing the north face in the morning. Prices sit in a similar €80-120 band but the choice is tiny, so book weeks ahead for snow weekends. What I would avoid is basing in Limassol and commuting up: it is 55 minutes each way on hairpins, so you lose two hours of daylight and cannot drink a glass of the local red with dinner.
Day 2, 09:00-13:30: the Solea valley and its painted churches
Leave Platres by 09:00, cross the summit road, and drop north on the B9 towards Kakopetria — twenty minutes of steady descent through pine. Stop first at Agios Nikolaos tis Stegis, 5 km short of the village on a side road by the river. It is one of the ten UNESCO-listed painted churches: an eleventh-century barn of a building under a second, steeper roof of flat tiles, with frescoes layered from the eleventh to the seventeenth century inside. Entry is free, a warden opens it from around 09:00 to 16:00 with a long lunch break in winter, and photography is not allowed. Twenty-five minutes is enough.
Then park at the bottom of old Kakopetria and walk up the cobbled spine of the restored quarter, where houses lean over a stream and the old watermill still turns. Coffee and a bougatsa in the square, then decide about Asinou. The church of Panagia Phorviotissa above Nikitari is the finest fresco cycle on the island, but it is a 25 km detour down out of the mountains, the key-holding priest usually comes across from the village cafe, and the round trip eats 90 minutes. Do it if painted churches are your reason for coming; skip it if you would rather have an unhurried lunch in Kakopetria at 13:00 for €15-20 a head.
Day 2, 14:00-18:00: Marathasa, cherries and sulphur
From Kakopetria the road back over to Pedoulas takes about 40 minutes via the Troodos junction. Pedoulas is cherry country — orchards blossom in the first half of April and fruit is sold from trestle tables in June — and it holds Archangelos Michael, a tiny 1474 church tucked below the main street with a dated, signed fresco cycle and a warden who appears when a car pulls up. Two kilometres downhill, Moutoullas has an even smaller painted chapel from 1280 plus the workshops that still carve the wooden kneading troughs sold across the island, and a spring water bottling plant that gives the village its name on supermarket shelves.
Finish in Kalopanagiotis, 10 minutes further down the valley, and give it the rest of the afternoon. The monastery of Agios Ioannis Lampadistis sits at the bottom of the village beside the river: three churches under one roof, frescoes spanning four centuries, and a small Byzantine museum with icons upstairs for a couple of euro. Below it are the sulphur springs the village was built around, now channelled into open-air pools that smell exactly as advertised. The village has been quietly restored over twenty years, stone lane by stone lane, and there are more good places to eat here than in anywhere else at this altitude.
Night two, and how you get back down
Sleep in Kalopanagiotis. The restored stone houses scattered through the village are the most interesting rooms in the Troodos, with beamed ceilings, cut-stone bathrooms and terraces over the gorge; the price band runs roughly €110-190 a night with breakfast, and the cheaper family guesthouses at the top of the village start nearer €65. Weekends from October to March are the busy season here, not summer, because Nicosians drive up for the sulphur baths and the fireplaces. If everything is full, Pedoulas has plainer rooms 10 minutes uphill at €60-90 and you lose nothing but the atmosphere.
Getting out on day three, you have three exits. Nicosia is 70 minutes via Kalopanagiotis-Gerakies and the E912 down to the Astromeritis road. Paphos is around 100 minutes if you go west past Kykkos monastery — worth the detour for the museum's gold and the ridge views, though the road beyond it is slow and unlit. Limassol back over the summit is 90 minutes. In snow conditions the police close the Troodos square approaches first and the Marathasa road later, so if you are due back at the airport in winter, take the northern exit and treat the summit as optional.
Before you book
The questions people ask about Limassol, answered with this month’s numbers.
Not properly. A couple of daily buses link Limassol with Platres and Troodos square, which covers day one, but there is no useful service across to Kakopetria, Pedoulas or Kalopanagiotis. Hiring a small car for two days costs roughly €60-90 in shoulder season and is the only sane way to link the two valleys.
January nights at 1,400 m sit around freezing and daytime highs reach 6-10C, with snow on the summit from late December to March. Hire cars come on normal tyres; carry chains only if you plan on the summit road after snowfall, and check whether the police have closed it before setting off.
Usually, but not reliably. Agios Nikolaos tis Stegis and Archangelos Michael in Pedoulas have wardens through the day with a lunch gap of roughly 13:00-14:00. Asinou depends on a key-holder from the village below. Arrive between 09:30 and 12:30, dress covering shoulders and knees, and expect no interior photography anywhere.
Two covers the summit, one valley walk and four churches at a civilised pace. A third day earns its place only if you want Kykkos monastery, the Cedar Valley track and the wine villages on the southern slope around Omodos, which need a full day of their own rather than a rushed afternoon.
