Karpaz Peninsula, Cyprus

...of the point of the Karpaz Peninsula. It is about a mile long and of soft sand. Behind the beach are dunes that become progressively more grassed over as you retreat from the shoreline, until you come under the shade of maritime pines.

When my wife and I found our way down to this beach at midday on a sunny spring morning, we were the only people there. Having parked our hired car out of sight back down the bumpy track, we went to ...
...is easy to identify the Karpaz Peninsula. It’s that pointy bit at the top right-hand corner, about forty miles long to its north-eastern tip. Some people have likened it to a panhandle, others to a unicorn’s horn or even to a dagger pointing at the underbelly of Turkey. To me it seems most to resemble a finger, in three knuckled sections tapering towards the nail at the end.

The first, widest section is best approached along the north ... more

The beach you see in the photo at the top of this page can be found just a few miles short of the point of the Karpaz Peninsula. It is about a mile long and of soft sand. Behind the beach are dunes that become progressively more grassed over as you retreat from the shoreline, until you come under the shade of maritime pines.

When my wife and I found our way down to this beach at midday on a sunny spring morning, we were the only people there. Having parked our hired car out of sight back down the bumpy track, we went to walk barefoot along the lapping wavelets at the water’s edge and feel the soft grains trickling in the tide between our toes. Then we selected a shady spot atop a dune for our picnic. Time passed as we ate, watching the shimmer of sunlight on the sea, undisturbed except by a hoopoe that came to perch on the branch above us and by the whisper of the wind. If there was any traffic on the coast road, which curves inland at this point away from the bay, it could not be heard from here.

Then came the clanking of roughly-made bells, and a mixed flock of sheep and goats emerged from amid the trees, cropping the grassy tufts as they approached us, only to be headed off again inland by a swarthy shepherd mounted on a donkey, leaving us alone once more.

Okay, let’s be honest; this beach isn’t quite as isolated as I’ve made it sound. Nearly, but not quite. Half hidden amid the dunes at one end, weathered into the landscape, is Ali’s Beach Bar, and it may well have been Ali who gave us a cheerful wave as we passed by. Certainly no one else seemed to be there. Half hidden amid the dunes at the other end, reached by a separate track, is the Turtle Beach Restaurant, with half a dozen bungalows and a campsite; when we walked up that way there seemed to be a few people lunching. But neither establishment is visible or audible from the central stretch of the beach, where, apart from the shepherd and his flock, we could for an hour or two imagine ourselves to be the only people on the island.

* Reaching the peninsula *

If you look at a map of Cyprus, it is easy to identify the Karpaz Peninsula. It’s that pointy bit at the top right-hand corner, about forty miles long to its north-eastern tip. Some people have likened it to a panhandle, others to a unicorn’s horn or even to a dagger pointing at the underbelly of Turkey. To me it seems most to resemble a finger, in three knuckled sections tapering towards the nail at the end.

The first, widest section is best approached along the north coast, taking a turn inland up twisty minor roads via Kantara Castle. Perched on a pinnacle, the castle is mainly rocky ruins, but affords a magnificent view out over the final foothills of the Kyrenian range towards the point of the Peninsula (see pic below), and whets your appetite for the journey ahead.

The alternative route, via the main road that approaches from Gazimagusa in the south, is boring by comparison. Where it follows the coast, around Bogaz, development is already under way, as it also is at Bafra, a bay further to the east – “the new investment hotspot with government backing” according to one property website. A profusion of newly-built estates of holiday accommodation is springing up there. Where the road turns inland it whisks you all too quickly through the countryside.

* Second stage *

Either way, you don’t really feel you’re out on the peninsula until you reach the second section at the nondescript town of Ziyamet. From here onwards there is, as yet, little new construction, and there are two different roads to follow, each with sights worth stopping for along the way; best to go out by one and return by the other. Best to slow down too, to suit the pace of life.

Turn off on the more minor road and you will soon encounter the deserted monastery of Panayia Kanakaria, its outbuildings overgrown and derelict. The main church still looks in good repair, and apparently there are some worthwhile frescos within. To see them, you have to seek out the headman of the nearby village to obtain the key, a diversion for which we failed to find the time. A little further along the road, we also failed to explore fully the village of Kale Burnu, where there are numerous Phoenician cave tombs, one of them 21 metres deep. But we did find time to notice the almost deserted landscape, rocky hills indented by valley pastures full of wild flowers, to pause for flocks of livestock encountered in the roadway, and to return the smiling waves of locals to whom passing traffic still seems to be of sufficient rarity to prompt acknowledgement.

You find rather less of this rusticity on the busier, more northerly, alternative route through the town of Yenierenkőy, a workaday place but worth a wander round, and which houses the only tourist information office on the peninsula. Beyond Yenierenkőy are found the Greek Cypriot village of Sipahi (still Greek despite partition, one of the few such places in Cyprus), the adjacent ruins of a 5th-century Byzantine Basilica with fine floor mosaics surviving, despite being open to the weather and the tread of sight-seers, and another abandoned monastery at Panayia Eleousa.

As historic sites, these are all minor. None of them would justify the drive out this way, although they add interest, all the more so because they are not packaged as tourist attractions or over-run by visitors. What more than justifies the journey is the sense of travelling back in time, as the habitations thin out and the traces of modernity recede along the way, a sense that is redoubled beyond Dipkarpaz, where the third stage of the Peninsula is reached.

* Beyond Dipkarpaz *

Dipkarpaz is the main town of the area, about a dozen miles from the point, but it feels more like a sprawling village than a town. Once one has identified the right route onwards from its sleepy main street, one is already out of it and into an area still wilder than before. Here are found the deserted beaches where turtles breed, the craggy hills where wild donkeys stray and the remoter relics, utterly untended and overgrown, like those of an ancient city at Aphendrika. In prehistoric times this was a huge metropolis, but now only the ruins of three mediaeval churches, themselves built on top of the earlier ruins, are easily identifiable.

There is hardly a settlement big enough even to be called a village beyond Dipkarpaz. A cluster of buildings, mostly abandoned, is to be found beside the ancient church at Ayios Philon, and another around the Apostoulos Andreas Monastery, out towards the tip of the Peninsula. Most of the latter were originally cells for monks and pilgrims, but pilgrimages to the place are much-reduced since partition and the cells seem in disrepair although the church is still in use. Outside the church a sort of street-market, with stalls selling everyday household items as well as souvenirs for sale, awaited custom, but there were no locals, only a handful of tourists like us, on hand to provide it.

The road runs out here, leaving just a dirt-track to cover the few further miles onwards to the final fingernail, Cape Andreas to the Greeks, Zafer Burnu to the Turks. The point is tipped by a hummock of rock, above which the twin flags of Turkey and the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus flutter, but which is mercifully free of any building. If you are lucky, you will have to share it only with the seabirds, of which there are many. We shared it with a party of bird-spotters, who were excitedly pointing out many rare specimens. Rising just thirty or forty metres above the shoreline, it provides just enough height for fine views: on out to sea, where several small islands jut up above the waves to extend the line of the peninsula; around along the rocky northern shore, fringed by scrubby greenery but without road or human habitation as far as the eye can see – and the eye can see quite a long way; back southwards to the monastery along the way you have come and will return.

* Places to stay…. *

…. are as yet few and far between, I’m glad to say. There are perhaps half a dozen hotels and campsites, and you could probably find rooms to let if you asked around. None of the hotels boasts more than one star in the tourist guide, and facilities tend to be a bit on the basic side, especially since there is little mains electricity, and many places rely on solar energy for power.

This was the case where we stayed, the Blue Sea Hotel on the southern shore east of Dipkarpaz. Its setting is delightful, beside a jetty harbouring a dozen or so fishing boats, with empty beaches stretching onwards beyond. These beaches are only intermittently sandy, but also have some fascinating rock formations and, unfortunately in common with many beaches on the peninsula, quite a bit of detritus – plastic bottles and the like – presumably washed up here having been discarded in some less pristine place.

Inside, the hotel was an oddity, with some rather tired but plushy furniture in cavernous public areas but just a few crude pieces in the bedrooms. The food – especially the freshly-caught fish – was good, but we did have a problem when the woman on the desk refused to recognise that the room had been paid for in advance by our travel company.

This might not arise elsewhere, of course, but none of the alternatives looked any better for amenities. While visiting the Apostoulos Andreas Monastery we had a coffee at the nearby Karpaz View Hotel, which seemed of a similar standard to the Blue Sea. The Oasis, predominantly a café-restaurant next door to the ruined church at Ayios Philon and overlooking an inlet of sparkling blue water, has some “rooms on the beach” to let; they look primitive from the outside but are actually quite comfortably furnished within, though without private bathrooms.

One possibility that rather appealed, although away from the coast, was the Karpaz Arch Houses, traditional buildings amid pleasant gardens on the outskirts of Dipkarpaz that have been tastefully converted into self-catering apartments. If I were to go back, I think I might stay there, but I don’t think I’ll go back.

* Things to do *

If you need to be programmed with activities, spending time in the Karpaz Peninsula may not be for you. It’s a place above all to wander round without a set agenda, discovering things as you go: the empty landscapes of the interior, the beaches and rocky coves beside the turquoise sea, the tiny hamlets, the ancient sites. There is wildlife to spot: the many birds and butterflies, the wild donkeys and dark woolly mouflon, the lizards, the green and loggerhead turtles that come to breed on the beaches in the summer months. In Spring, there are the seemingly endless spreads of wild flowers: golden anthemis and Byzantine gladioli in a mauvey shade of shocking pink, Martagon lilies, grape hyacinths, wild iris, orchids and geraniums. And so on.

* In my back yard *

So there you are. That’s the Karpaz Peninsula. Doesn’t sound as if there’s much to it, does it? In truth, there isn’t much to it, which is one reason why it will be so difficult to preserve that which there is. Although it has an unkempt beauty of its own, it is far from being the most picturesque spot in the Mediterranean; those that are more picturesque have mostly already succumbed to being overrun.

There must have been many places like the Karpaz Peninsula not very long ago. If you could go back just forty or fifty years, much of the coastline of Greece, Italy and Spain would have been like this. Maybe parts of Turkey or North Africa still are, but natural wildlife and solitude is everywhere in retreat, becoming harder to find with every day that passes.

I have been told that the peninsula is a nature reserve and has some kind of legal protection, but I have searched in vain on the internet to discover exactly what the terms of any such protection might be. Whatever it is, I wouldn’t set too much store by it. Such strictures can usually be circumvented, even where there is political will to enforce them. The economic and commercial pressures in favour of development tend to be too strong; national treasuries want hard currency, property and travel companies want profits, local people want touristic jobs.

As for political will, in one of the bits of bumf I picked up at the tourist information office, I found transcribed an interview with the TRNC Minister for Tourism. Answering one question about the impact of construction and the environmental pollution linked to it, he said: “We agree that there is quite a negative impact from the construction being carried on at the height of the tourist seasons. We have begun to study this problem. At this very moment our colleagues are busy examining the matter…. In particular, we are trying to instigate measures to prevent the tourists who come to our country in order to relax by the pool from being annoyed by the noise of building machinery and by the dust created by the construction sites.”

Note the assumptions behind this answer: that tourists come primarily to relax by pools, and that the nuisance is the noise and the dust, not the construction itself and the resultant smothering in concrete of the natural landscape. And as for urgency, well, they have begun to study the problem, whilst the hotels and holiday apartments are all the time mushrooming up along the shore. Not yet at the tip of the Karpaz Peninsula, it’s true, nor even the next knuckle down. But at the base of the finger, the gangrene has begun, and one cannot see its outward spread being prevented, let alone reversed.

That’s why I won’t go back, for fear of what I might find there if I did. That instead of there being too few, and too primitive, places to stay, there would be dozens of smart modern ones to choose from. For example, it’s hard to imagine that the isolated beach at which my wife and I picnicked will not in due course be rescued from its isolation and encouraged to support several pink hotels, each no doubt with its own parking lot, boutique, and swinging hot spot.

* Recommendation *

No, I won’t go back. But I do recommend it to you, provided you go soon, and with a clear understanding of what to expect. Why do I recommend it, you may be wondering, when each additional visitor, however careful, can only add to the degradation of so a fragile an environment?

Well, I fear that it’s going to be spoiled in a major way before long in any case. In the meantime, it matters little if it’s spoiled in a minor way by those who might appreciate what’s left of it. The only question is by whom. It’s already been me. It might as well be you too.

* Tree Museum *

Responding to another question in the interview quoted above, this time about the free-roaming donkeys, the Minister for Tourism said: “These donkeys have really unique features and live their lives in a way that is rarely met anywhere else in the world, In a project that we plan to realize in the near future we will attempt to round them all up into a safe area. We are thinking of erecting observation towers within this enclosure, so as to enable tourists to have a look at them.”

Is it just me, or has he missed the point?

© torr 2007

Note: routine information about travel to and around North Cyprus, currency and prices, cuisine, language, etc. may be found in my general North Cyprus review, entitled “Going, going….” For the sake of brevity and the avoidance of repetition, I have not duplicated it here. 

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