Paphos (Pafos)

The archaeological park at the edge of the harbour holds the best Roman floor mosaics in the eastern Mediterranean, and the detail that makes them legible is that they are domestic. These were the floors of large private houses belonging to rich men, not the pavements of temples or civic halls — which is why the subjects are mythology as entertainment rather than propaganda: Dionysus in triumph, Theseus and the labyrinth, the first bath of Achilles, a hunt running the length of a room. You walk on raised boards above them and look down into rooms whose walls are gone, which makes the floor the whole surviving building. They lasted because they were buried: earth and later construction sealed them until the twentieth century, and the same soil that hid them protected the colour, which is startlingly intact.

North of the town, cut straight down into the coastal rock, is a necropolis of underground courtyards ringed by carved stone columns — burial chambers built to look like houses, on the reasoning that the dead should be housed as the living were. The name is a later invention and it is wrong: no king was ever buried here. They were the tombs of senior officials and wealthy families, and the name came from how grand they are rather than from who is in them. That is worth knowing before you go, because the site rewards a different kind of attention than a royal tomb would — you are looking at domestic architecture translated into rock, open to the sky, with the sea immediately beyond.

The lower town by the harbour is where the ruins, the restaurants and most of the visitors are, with a small castle at the end of the quay that has been rebuilt by successive occupiers and is more interesting for that than for anything inside it. The upper town, a couple of kilometres inland and several hundred metres higher, is where the district's ordinary life happens: the market, the municipal museum, the streets that are busy on a weekday morning for reasons unconnected to tourism. Visitors who only see the lower town come away thinking the place is a resort with ruins in it. The two together are a considerably better day, and the walk or short drive between them is the whole point.

The peninsula at the island's northwest tip is the last substantial piece of Cypriot coast without development, and it is protected precisely because the road effectively stops. What is there is scrub-covered hills running down to clear water, a deep limestone gorge with walls close enough to touch on both sides, a lagoon of improbable colour usually reached by boat, and a long beach where green and loggerhead turtles come ashore to nest through the summer, which is why nothing has been built behind it and nothing will be. The tracks in are rough enough to require the right vehicle or an organised trip, and ordinary hire cars are frequently prohibited from them by the rental agreement.

This district is where the goddess is supposed to have come ashore, and two sites carry that association. On the south coast, a large sea stack stands off a pebble beach with a smaller rock beside it, and it is the most photographed natural feature on the island — best at sunset, when the light comes down the coast behind it. It is worth knowing before you go that the beach is coarse pebble rather than sand and that the current running past the stack is genuinely strong; people get into difficulty here every season, and the swim out to the rock that folklore encourages is not a good idea. At the other end of the district, on the approach to the peninsula, a small spring-fed pool sits under a fig tree in a rock grotto. It takes two minutes to see and it is frankly modest — the reason to stop is that the coastal path into the wild peninsula starts from the car park beside it, and that walk is the real attraction.

On the way to the peninsula, two small towns on the northwest shore make a completely different base from the southern resorts: a working fishing harbour with a strip of tavernas, and an inland town with an ordinary square, both of them a fraction of the size and price of the coast further south. Behind them the land climbs into the western end of the mountains, where two of the island's painted Byzantine churches stand, and where a valley of native cedar holds the island's endemic wild sheep — rarely seen, genuinely wild, and the animal that appears on everything from coins to aeroplane tails. It is a long, slow, unsurfaced drive to get in there and almost nobody does it.