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Coverage / Cyprus

Cyprus

Western Asia

An eastern Mediterranean island republic, the third largest island in the sea, where a warm coastline of shipwrecks and turtle beaches climbs into the pine-clad Troodos mountains. The Republic of Cyprus controls the southern part of the island; its calendar runs from Paphos's UNESCO mosaics and the ancient Commandaria wine villages to winter skiing on Mount Olympus.

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What you can do in Cyprus

Culinary / Cooking

Pera OrinisApr May Jun Jul Sep OctCypriot food is best understood in a village kitchen rather than a restaurant, and Pera Orinis, a farming village in the Nicosia foothills, is where you can cook it hands-on. The island's cuisine is a blend of Greek, Anatolian and Levantine influences built on local herbs, pulses, olive oil and, above all, halloumi, the squeaky brine cheese that Cypriot farmers have relied on for protein for hundreds of years and that is now protected as a Cypriot product. At the family agrotourism farm here you make halloumi and its soft by-product anari from scratch, then cook a spread of traditional dishes and sit down to a full meze of what you have prepared, using vegetables, herbs and dairy from the farm itself. It is a slow, generational way to learn the food, taught by a family that has worked the same village for generations, and it doubles as a window into rural Cypriot life away from the resort coast.

Museums & Galleries

PaphosMar Apr May Jun Sep Oct NovPaphos is one of the richest open-air archaeology sites in the Mediterranean, and you can read it across a single day. The Archaeological Park of Kato Pafos protects a group of grand Roman villas whose floors carry some of the finest ancient mosaics anywhere: in the House of Dionysos, panels of gods, myths and the wine harvest survive in colour, alongside the Houses of Theseus, Aion and Orpheus, all linked by boardwalks over the ruins of an Odeon, an Agora and a medieval castle. A short way north, the Tombs of the Kings is a necropolis cut straight into the coastal rock, its grandest chambers ringed by Doric columns and modelled on the houses of the living, echoing the tombs of Alexandria. Both have been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1980 and are run by the Department of Antiquities. Seeing the mosaics and the tombs together lays out the whole Hellenistic and Roman story of a city that was once the capital of Cyprus.

Music & Culture Festivals

Limassol Wine FestivalLimassolSep OctThe Limassol Wine Festival is the oldest and largest public celebration of Cypriot wine, and each autumn it fills the Limassol Municipal Gardens for around nine evenings. The Municipality of Limassol has run it since 1961, and continuously since 1978, gathering the big island wineries, KEO, SODAP, LOEL and ETKO, at open stands where a single entry brings free tastings poured straight from the barrel. Between the wine there is folk dancing, theatre, live music and long tables of traditional meze, grilled meat and village bread. This is a locals-first festival rather than a tourist show, and it lands at the end of the grape harvest, when the wine villages on the Troodos slopes above the city are at their busiest. Going means an evening in the gardens tasting your way through what a Mediterranean wine island actually drinks, rather than a curated cellar door. The 2026 edition is the sixty-fifth.

Scuba Diving

LarnacaApr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct NovLarnaca exists on the dive map for one reason, the Zenobia. She was a brand-new 172-metre Swedish-built roll-on roll-off ferry that capsized and sank in the bay on her maiden voyage in June 1980, still loaded with more than a hundred articulated lorries, and she now lies on her port side between about 16 and 42 metres just outside the harbour. Divers consistently vote her one of the ten best wreck dives in the world, and the short boat ride from Larnaca means you are down on the wreck within minutes rather than after a long crossing. The water is warm and clear for much of the year, and the wreck has range: shallow passes over the car deck and the upper hull for newer divers, and deeper penetration of the cargo holds, the accommodation and the bridge for those with the training. Around the Zenobia the local centres also run reef and cavern dives, so a week here mixes the headline wreck with easier days.

Skiing & Snowsports

TroodosJan Feb MarCyprus has the one thing almost no one associates with the island: a working ski centre, on the summit of Mount Olympus in the Troodos mountains at 1,952 metres. It is small and it is a novelty, but it is real. The Cyprus Ski Club runs four lifts here, a chairlift on the FIS-homologated Zeus slope on the exposed north face and three T-bars serving the gentler Sun Valley runs of Aphrodite, Hermes and Hera, and the season usually holds from January into late March when Mediterranean storms drop snow on the peak. The draw is not the terrain, which is modest, but the setting and the contrast: on a good winter day you can ski a few morning runs in the pines and be swimming or walking a coastal path by the afternoon, an hour or so downhill. The club stages an annual FIS race on the Zeus piste and runs the island's only ski school and rental shop, making this the place beginners on Cyprus learn to turn.

Trekking / Hiking

TroodosMar Apr May Jun Oct NovTroodos is where Cyprus goes vertical and green, and its nature trails are the best way to see it on foot. The signposted routes fan out around Chionistra, the summit of Mount Olympus at 1,952 metres, and each has its own character. The Artemis Trail circles the peak at around 1,800 metres through black pine and juniper with long views to both coasts, the Caledonia Trail drops along the Kryos Potamos stream to the island's highest waterfall, and the Atalante Trail starts from Troodos square and passes a drinkable mountain spring. The range is also a living museum: ten of its remote painted churches carry Byzantine frescoes protected as UNESCO World Heritage, and the lower villages are wine and orchard country. Spring brings endemic wildflowers found nowhere else on earth, autumn brings cool light and the grape harvest, and a local guide turns a walk into a reading of the geology, the plants and the mountain villages.

Wildlife Safaris

AkamasApr May Jun Jul Aug SepThe Akamas is the last stretch of Cypriot coast the developers never reached, a roadless peninsula of limestone gorges, wild herbs and turquoise coves that survives as a nature reserve precisely because it is so hard to get to. Its greatest asset is Lara Bay, one of the most important sea-turtle nesting beaches in the whole Mediterranean, where both the loggerhead turtle, Caretta caretta, and the rarer green turtle, Chelonia mydas, haul out through the summer to lay their eggs. A government hatchery has protected the nests here since 1978, caging clutches against predators and releasing the hatchlings, and it is treated as one of the Mediterranean's conservation success stories. Nesting is a wild, protected event rather than a show, so a guided four-wheel-drive safari is the honest way to experience the peninsula: the trip crosses terrain no ordinary car can manage to reach Lara and its turtle beach, the deep Avakas Gorge and the Blue Lagoon, reading the landscape and the wildlife along the way.

Wine / Spirits Education

KrasochoriaMay Jun Sep OctThe Krasochoria, literally the wine villages, are where Cypriot wine is easiest to learn at the source, on the southern slopes of Troodos above Limassol. This is the home of Commandaria, a sweet wine made from sun-dried Xynisteri and Mavro grapes that is credited as the oldest named wine still made anywhere, its recipe traced back to antiquity and a name given by the Knights of the Templar Commandery. The story here is not French but Cypriot: aromatic native whites like Xynisteri and Promara, and reds from Mavro and the rediscovered Maratheftiko, grown on terraces high enough to escape the phylloxera that reshaped European vineyards. A weekend up here moves between old stone villages such as Omodos and Koilani, each with cellars worked by the same families for generations, and a handful of boutique estates that sit you down for a structured tasting and walk you through how the wines are grown and made. You taste across a dozen producers without driving far.

Best months at a glance

	J	F	M	A	M	J	J	A	S	O	N	D
Culinary
Museums
Music Festivals
Scuba Diving
Skiing
Trekking
Wildlife Safaris
Wine & Spirits

Upcoming events in Cyprus

Limassol Wine FestivalSep 26, 2026 – Oct 4, 2026expected