Famagusta (Mağusa)

The southeast corner has the best swimming on Cyprus and it is not close. Fine pale sand over a shallow shelf produces water of a turquoise that photographs look doctored, and a series of small bays between low headlands means there is almost always somewhere sheltered whatever the wind is doing. The two main towns split the market cleanly: one is the island's loudest resort, built around a long famous beach and a nightlife industry that runs hard through the season, and the other is quieter, more family-shaped and built around a string of smaller coves. They are twenty minutes apart and booking the wrong one is the commonest disappointment on this coast. Between them and the cape, the shoreline turns to low limestone cliff cut with sea caves you can swim and snorkel into.

The cape at the southeastern tip is a protected forest park and the antidote to the resort strips a few kilometres behind it. There is no development on it: juniper scrub, low cliffs, a natural rock arch, sea caves at the waterline and a network of marked paths and cycle routes along the top. The water here is the clearest on an island of clear water, which makes it the best shore snorkelling in Cyprus and a standard stop for dive boats. Go early — there is no shade anywhere on the headland and the paths are exposed for their whole length — and take more water than the distances suggest you need.

North of the line, a complete ring of Venetian fortification encloses a town that was one of the wealthiest ports in the Mediterranean six hundred years ago and is a quiet provincial place today. Inside the walls stands the reason to come: a fourteenth-century Gothic cathedral, converted to a mosque and in use as one ever since, with a west front that would not look out of place in northern France and a minaret rising from one of its towers. It is an extraordinary building and it is free to enter outside prayer times, with the usual requirements — shoes off, shoulders and knees covered, quiet, and stay out of the way of anyone praying. Around it the old town holds the shells of a great many other medieval churches, most roofless, several used as storage or simply standing in yards. A square keep at the harbour corner of the walls is traditionally tied to Shakespeare's play, which set its action in a seaport on this island. Reaching any of this means crossing the line, which is a planning matter rather than a difficult one — the documents, insurance and vehicle rules are worth settling before the day rather than at the barrier.

A few kilometres up the coast lie the remains of a major Greco-Roman city spread over a wide, sandy, half-wooded site running down to a beach — a colonnaded gymnasium with statues still standing along it, a large theatre, bath complexes with mosaic and hypocaust surviving, and a street grid you can walk for an hour without covering. It is enormous, lightly supervised and often almost empty, which is a rare combination for a site of this importance. Take water and something on your feet: it is sand and stone underfoot with very little shade. Inland from it, a monastery with a domed church and a small separate tomb chapel marks a site of considerable significance in the island's Christian history, and its icon museum is worth the short detour.

On the southern edge of the northern city is a beachfront quarter that was evacuated in 1974 and fenced off, and stood empty and closed for decades afterwards. Parts of it have since been opened, and visitors now walk or cycle designated streets through it. What you see is a resort district that stopped: hotel towers and apartment blocks standing open to the weather, shopfronts, roads returning to scrub, and the beach beyond. It is not scenic and it is not a ruin in the archaeological sense — it is recent, ordinary buildings that people lived and worked in, which is what makes walking through it a different experience from walking through Salamis. Stay on the marked routes, which exist for safety as much as anything, observe the photography restrictions where they are posted, and treat it as somewhere people's homes were rather than as a backdrop. Access arrangements here have changed more than once; check the current position before planning a day around it.

From the north of the district a long finger of land runs out into the sea, and it is the emptiest part of Cyprus by a wide margin. Development thins almost immediately, the roads narrow, and what is left is scrub, small farming villages, and a series of undeveloped beaches — including a very long one of pale sand at the far end where turtles nest and the facilities amount to very little. Feral donkeys roam the peninsula in numbers and are its unofficial emblem; they are wild animals, they will approach cars looking for food, and feeding them is discouraged for good reasons. At the very tip, a monastery that has been a pilgrimage site for a long time marks the end of the road. It is a two- to three-hour drive out from the walled city with essentially nothing along the way, which is precisely why people who make it rate it so highly.