Limassol (Leymasun)

On a headland west of the city, with a sheer drop to the sea on one side, sits a Greco-Roman city that would be the centrepiece of most countries' tourism and is somehow a footnote in this one. The theatre is cut into the slope so that the audience faces the stage with the Mediterranean directly behind it, and it is not a preserved relic — it is still used for performances, which is the best possible way to see it. Around it are the remains of a large late-Roman house with mosaic floors and its own bath suite, a public bath complex with the underfloor heating system exposed, and an early Christian basilica. A short distance further west is a separate sanctuary to Apollo, with columns re-erected among the trees. Go in the late afternoon: the site is entirely unshaded, and the low sun off the sea behind the theatre is the reason to be there at that hour rather than any other.

Limassol is not pretty in the way the smaller coastal towns are, and it does not try to be. It is the island's commercial centre, with the container port that handles most of what arrives here and an office district that has grown fast. What that produces, for a visitor, is a city where the restaurants exist for residents rather than for holidaymakers — which is why the food is better and cheaper a street back from the seafront than anywhere on the resort strips. The old quarter around the castle has been restored into a walkable grid of lanes, the medieval castle itself is small but holds a good medieval collection, and the seafront promenade runs for kilometres and is where the whole city goes in the evening. The carnival here is the biggest on the island and the wine festival is a genuine civic event rather than a tourist one.

The southern slopes above the city hold a run of stone villages that have been making wine for a very long time, and they are close enough that the drive up is a morning rather than an expedition. They are cobbled, small, built of the local honey-coloured stone, and several have been restored carefully enough to be worth walking round on their own terms — a monastery, a square, a church, a handful of places to eat what the village eats. The wineries range from industrial-scale operations to families working out of a converted outbuilding, and the smaller ones are the interesting visit. This is also the country that produces the island's famous sweet sun-dried wine, and the villages entitled to make it are a specific and small group on these slopes.

Between the city and the headland stands a compact square keep that looks like a straightforward Crusader castle and was something more interesting: the administrative centre of a vast agricultural estate run by a military order, which grew sugar cane on the plain around it and processed it in a mill whose ruins stand beside the tower. Sugar, not defence, was what made the place rich, and the sweet wine of the hills behind takes its name from the estate's title. The keep itself takes twenty minutes — three rooms and a roof with a view over the plain — and the point of the stop is the mill and the aqueduct beside it as much as the tower.

South of the city a flat peninsula runs out into the sea, holding a large seasonal salt lake that draws flamingos and other migrating birds through the winter months, a long shallow beach popular with families, and a British sovereign base area — which is UK territory rather than Cypriot, though for a visitor driving to the beach it means signage and nothing else. In the opposite direction the district runs all the way up to the island's highest ground: a summit approaching two thousand metres, forest walking on marked trails, and in a normal winter enough snow for the island's small ski operation, which is a genuinely strange thing to find at this latitude and an easy day from a coast where people are swimming.