There is a corner of Cyprus where the resort concrete stops and another island begins: one of hidden coves, fragrant scrub and water so clear it looks painted. This is the Akamas Peninsula, the country's last great stretch of wild coastline, a nature park where mythology sets the love affairs of Aphrodite and where sea turtles nest today. There are no giant hotels or seafront promenades here: there are trails among orchids, gorges carved into the rock, beaches you can only reach by 4x4 and a lagoon of an impossible turquoise that has become the emblem of the region.
Akamas is a place to slow down and get your feet a little dirty. You can explore it by boat from the small fishing village of Latsi, gliding past cliffs to the famous Blue Lagoon; or on foot, following the trails that start at the Baths of Aphrodite, the spring surrounded by fig trees where, according to myth, the goddess of love used to bathe. The more adventurous take a 4x4 along dirt tracks to Lara Bay, a sanctuary for loggerhead and green turtles, or descend into the narrow Avakas Gorge, between rock walls tens of metres high.
This guide covers Akamas with a practical, warm eye: how to get there and get around a park with no public transport, which coves and trails are worth it, how much a cruise to the Blue Lagoon costs, where to see turtles without disturbing them and how to combine the peninsula with Paphos and Polis. Akamas is not a sun-lounger, all-inclusive destination: it is Cyprus in its purest form, the kind you have to earn on foot, and that is exactly why you remember it forever.
The name Akamas comes from Greek mythology: Akamas, son of the Athenian hero Theseus, is said to have reached these shores on his return from the Trojan War and given his name to the peninsula. The area is steeped in the cult of Aphrodite, the goddess of love who, according to legend, was born from the foam of the Cypriot sea (at nearby Petra tou Romiou) and bathed in the spring we now call the Baths of Aphrodite. Beyond the myth, Akamas remained almost uninhabited for centuries, which explains why its nature stayed intact while the rest of the Cypriot coast filled up with resorts. In the 20th century, part of the peninsula was used as a British military firing range, a controversial use that delayed its development. Since the 1980s, environmentalists and bodies such as the European Union have pushed for its permanent protection: today it is a Natura 2000 site and one of the last refuges for sea turtles, monk seals and dozens of endemic Mediterranean species. The full story, from the myth of Aphrodite to today's environmental struggle, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The west of the island, heart of the age-old cult of Aphrodite and capital of Roman Cyprus. It has the mosaics and the Tombs of the Kings of Paphos, a World Heritage Site, and the unspoilt Akamas peninsula.
Read the history of The west (Paphos, Akamas) →They depart from Pafos, 34 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few corners of Cyprus are as steeped in myth as the Akamas Peninsula, and it all starts with its name. According to Greek tradition, Akamas was an Athenian hero, son of the famous Theseus (the one who killed the Minotaur) and a comrade-in-arms in the Trojan War. When the war ended, on his way home, Akamas is said to have landed at the far north-western tip of Cyprus and founded a settlement there, giving his name to the whole peninsula. It is the kind of founding legend the ancient Greeks liked to attach to their colonies around the Mediterranean, linking each territory to a hero of the Trojan cycle.
Whatever the truth about the man himself, the Akamas story reflects a real event: the arrival of Greek settlers (Achaeans and Mycenaeans) in Cyprus after the collapse of the Mycenaean world, towards the end of the Bronze Age (12th-11th centuries BC). Those settlers Hellenised the island, brought the Greek language and founded the city-kingdoms that would rule Cyprus for centuries. The peninsula, however, stayed on the margins: far from the great city-states such as Paphos, Salamis or Kition, it was always a frontier land, thinly populated and covered in forest and scrub.
That isolation, which in Antiquity meant poverty, turned out in the long run to be Akamas's greatest stroke of luck. While the rest of the Cypriot coast was settled, farmed and, much later, filled with hotels, the peninsula stayed almost untouched. What we admire today as the last wild landscape in Cyprus is partly the result of centuries of neglect.
If one myth defines the whole of Cyprus, it is that of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty who, according to tradition, was born from the sea foam off the island's shores (at the nearby rock of Petra tou Romiou, south of Paphos). Throughout Antiquity, Cyprus was the great centre of the cult of Aphrodite —the Romans called her Venus— and Paphos, with its famous sanctuary, drew pilgrims from all over the Mediterranean. The Akamas Peninsula was wrapped up in that world of myth and love.
The most famous spot is the spring we now call the Baths of Aphrodite. According to legend, the goddess bathed in these waters hidden among fig trees, and it was here that she met and seduced Adonis, the strikingly beautiful young mortal she fell madly in love with. The myth of Aphrodite and Adonis —with the young man's tragic end, killed by a wild boar, and the goddess's grief— is one of the great tales of love and death in classical mythology, and it has been tied to these places ever since. Nearby, tradition also places the 'Adonis Baths', today a tourist attraction in a gorge with waterfalls.
These myths were not mere literature: they reflected a real and very ancient cult of a goddess of fertility and love whose roots in Cyprus went back to eastern deities older than the Greeks, such as the Phoenician Astarte and the 'great goddesses' of the Near East. Akamas, with its springs and untamed nature, fitted perfectly into the image of a land devoted to love. Even today, much of the peninsula's appeal to visitors plays on that heritage: the 'Aphrodite coast' is a brand that evokes this blend of myth, landscape and Mediterranean sensuality.
Over the centuries, Akamas remained a frontier land, sparsely inhabited and subject to the same ups and downs as the rest of Cyprus, but always in the background. After the Roman and Byzantine periods, the island suffered Arab raids (7th-10th centuries) that ravaged the coasts and pushed people inland; exposed coastal settlements, like those on the peninsula, emptied out even further. Remains from that era survive on the Akamas coast, such as small Byzantine churches and the medieval tower known as Pyrgos tis Rigaenas ('the queen's tower'), linked by legend to a medieval queen, which today is a stop along the walking trails.
In the Middle Ages, Cyprus was a crusader kingdom under the Lusignan dynasty (1192-1489) and then a possession of the Republic of Venice (1489-1571), but life in Akamas went on far from the courts and Gothic cathedrals of Nicosia or Famagusta. It was a district of shepherds, fishermen and smallholders, with villages scattered along the edges of the peninsula. When the Ottomans conquered Cyprus in 1571 after the fall of Famagusta, little changed: Akamas remained a poor, peripheral territory, valued mainly for its forests, its hunting and its grazing land.
That continuity —centuries of humble rural life, with no major building works or towns— explains why the peninsula's natural landscape reached the 20th century almost intact. Where there was no development, the landscape was not destroyed. Many of the trails that hikers follow today still trace the old paths of shepherds and woodcutters.
The 20th century brought Akamas a chapter as unusual as it was decisive for its recent history. Cyprus came under British control in 1878 (and was a formal colony from 1925), and after the island's independence in 1960 the United Kingdom kept two sovereign military bases and certain rights. For decades, part of the Akamas Peninsula was used as a firing range and training ground by British forces (and, at times, by allied units), who carried out live-fire exercises in the area.
That military use had a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, the firing range and the access restrictions ruled out any tourist or urban development for much of the 20th century: while the coast at Ayia Napa, Limassol or Paphos filled up with hotels, Akamas stayed frozen in time, protected in practice by the army. On the other hand, the live-ammunition exercises sparked fierce environmental and political controversy, with protests from environmentalists and Cypriot society demanding an end to the exercises and protection for a unique natural area. Over time, and amid that pressure, military use of the area wound down.
This episode explains Akamas's unusual conservation story: it was not saved by an early decision to protect it but, to a large extent, by decades of neglect and military restrictions. When its future was finally debated, the peninsula was still, almost miraculously, one of the last stretches of undeveloped Mediterranean coastline.
Since the late 20th century, Akamas has become a battleground of a different kind: the clash between nature conservation and the pressure of tourism and property development. As the rest of Cyprus filled up with hotel complexes, developers and landowners eyed this untouched strip of coast with interest, while environmentalists, scientists and international bodies warned that it was one of the last refuges of biodiversity in the eastern Mediterranean.
Loggerhead (Caretta caretta) and green (Chelonia mydas) sea turtles nest in Akamas, especially at Lara Bay, where a conservation station has been protecting the nests for decades. The peninsula is also home to a huge variety of plants —including orchids and species endemic to Cyprus—, migratory birds, reptiles and the iconic Cyprus mouflon. Because of its ecological value, the area was included in the European Union's Natura 2000 network and has been the subject of successive management plans and of the long-demanded promise to turn it into a fully protected national park.
The process has been slow and not without tension. There have been disputes over the park's boundaries, over infrastructure works (roads, facilities) and over how far any kind of construction or motorised access should be allowed. Environmental groups have denounced pressure to 'open up' the area to tourism, while the authorities try to balance conservation and use. Today Akamas is a managed nature park, with trails, traffic restrictions and protection for the nesting beaches, but its final status is still being debated. For travellers, the message is clear: exploring Akamas is a privilege that calls for respect —leave no litter, don't disturb the turtles, stay on the paths— so that the last wild landscape in Cyprus can go on existing.
