Kyrenia (Keryneia)

The old harbour is a near-perfect horseshoe of stone quay, small enough to walk round in ten minutes, lined with buildings that were merchants' warehouses and are now almost entirely restaurants. It works because of its scale — the boats are close, the water is clear, and the far side is always in view. Guarding the entrance is a heavy, low castle that grew by accretion under a run of different rulers, and its walls are worth the circuit for the view back over the town and up to the mountains. Late afternoon into evening is the hour here: the light comes round onto the quay, the day boats come in, and the harbour does the thing it has been doing for a very long time.

Inside the castle is a small museum holding something genuinely extraordinary and almost unmentioned outside the island: a Greek merchant ship that sank off this coast in the fourth century before the common era, found by a local diver and raised in the 1960s. Roughly three-quarters of the hull survives — actual timber, not a reconstruction — and it is displayed alongside the cargo that went down with it: hundreds of wine amphorae, millstones that served as ballast, and a quantity of almonds. It is one of the oldest recovered vessels anywhere in the world, and the detail that lands hardest is the ordinariness of it: a working trading ship on a normal run, with the crew's own cups and cooking gear among the freight. Allow more time in this one room than the rest of the castle.

On a terrace above the town, with the coast laid out below it, stand the ruins of a Gothic abbey founded in the thirteenth century — the cloister with its arcade largely intact, the refectory a tall vaulted hall with a rose window and a pulpit set into the wall, and the church still roofed and in use. It is the best-preserved Gothic ruin on Cyprus and its setting does most of the work: the refectory windows open straight onto air and sea, several hundred metres up. The village around it has grown into the abbey's shoulder and there are places to sit and eat under the trees on the approach, which is a pleasant end to a morning rather than an afterthought.

Along the crest of the range stand three separate crusader mountain castles, built to hold the passes and to signal to one another. The westernmost is the one to climb if you climb only one: three wards ascending a rock peak, a Byzantine core with later building on top, gatehouses and cisterns and a royal apartment near the summit, and a view that takes in both coasts on a clear day. It is a genuine ascent on steps and rough path, and the upper ward defeats a fair number of people who set out for it. The middle castle is the highest and the least visited, reached by a long walk from a rough road and correspondingly empty. The eastern one, out toward the peninsula, is the smallest and the most complete, and is the easiest of the three to actually get into.

West and east of the town the coast road runs between the ridge and the water past a string of villages that were citrus and olive country and are now a mix of that and low-key development. There are beaches along the whole length, some of them with facilities and some of them nothing more than a track down to sand. Several of the quieter ones east of the town are protected turtle nesting sites, with green and loggerhead turtles coming ashore through the summer; the protection is real, sections are closed at night in season, and volunteers monitor the nests. Drive it slowly rather than as a transfer — the interest is the strip itself, with the mountains constantly on one side and the sea on the other.