Things to Do in Cyprus

A Greco-Roman city on a limestone bluff seventy metres above the sea, where you watch the Mediterranean from the same theatre seats an audience used two thousand years ago.

The UNESCO-listed heart of Nea Paphos, where a Roman odeon, a Byzantine castle and the finest mosaic floors in the eastern Mediterranean sit inside one seaside fence.

A Hellenistic necropolis carved straight down into the coastal rock, where you descend staircases into columned courtyards with the sea breaking a hundred metres away.

A UNESCO-listed village of round mud-brick houses abandoned around 5200 BC, with five full-size reconstructions you can walk into and understand in ten minutes.

Five hundred square metres of third-century Roman floor mosaic found by a farmer's plough in 1962, and still the finest set of figured pavements in the eastern Mediterranean.

The Mycenaean and Phoenician city under modern Larnaca, where a sunken temple precinct of Astarte sits between apartment blocks a quarter of an hour from the seafront.

A square kilometre of Roman city among sand dunes and acacia on the east coast, with a colonnaded gymnasium, a theatre for fifteen thousand and a beach at the far end.

The last divided capital in Europe, walked end to end in an afternoon: Venetian ramparts, a restored craft quarter, and a pedestrian crossing where the city simply stops.

The knot of lanes between the medieval castle and the old port where Limassol drinks, eats and stays out late — the sea-city quarter that gives the coast's biggest resort strip an actual old heart.

A horseshoe of Venetian-era warehouses, fishing boats and a vast castle on the north coast — the most photographed waterfront on the island and the reason people cross the buffer zone for the day.

The wine village everyone in Limassol sends you to: a cobbled square the size of a football pitch, a monastery in the middle of it, and cellars pouring commandaria and zivania on both sides.

A ninth-century stone church built over the tomb of Lazarus, with a carved gilt iconostasis, an empty sarcophagus in the crypt and a bell tower the Ottomans once forbade.

A village church outside Larnaca that keeps a sixth-century mosaic of the Virgin between two archangels, one of the greatest surviving works of early Byzantine art anywhere.

An Ottoman mosque and pilgrimage shrine set in palms and cypresses on the shore of Larnaca Salt Lake, where flamingos stand in the water from November to March.

Cyprus's best-loved forest walk: three kilometres of black pine, cold running water and dozens of stream crossings ending at a thirteen-metre waterfall — and the one place on the island that feels nothing like the coast.

A limestone slot canyon in the wild Akamas where walls thirty metres high close to a couple of arm-spans apart — the most dramatic short walk in western Cyprus, and one that starts twenty minutes from a Coral Bay sunbed.

The wild headland between Ayia Napa and Protaras: white cliffs, sea caves, a natural rock arch and a network of marked footpaths above water so clear you can count the fish from twenty metres up.

The postcard bay that made Ayia Napa famous: 500 metres of white sand, water shallow enough to wade to your own island, and a beach-bar soundtrack that runs from breakfast to sunset.

Paphos district's best swimming beach — a sheltered golden crescent between two limestone headlands, calm enough for children and close enough to the city for a spontaneous sea afternoon.

Limassol's remade seafront: a kilometre of palm groves, reflecting pools and open-air sculpture between the Old Port and the city beaches, and the walk every local does at sunset.

The old capital's grocery shopping in one covered hall plus the open-air stalls on the bastion outside — halloumi, olives, coriander sausage and village bread, all bought where the city buys it.

The stone market hall behind the old high street where Limassol has bought its vegetables, halloumi and coriander sausage for a century — now half grocery, half coffee stop, and still cheaper than any hotel breakfast.

Upper Paphos at street level: a nineteenth-century market hall of lace, spices, honey and vegetables, ringed by the old high street the beach resorts below never see.