Walking around long white sand beaches, exploring ruins of ancient European civilisations, going on pilgrimage or wandering between villages lost in the mountains, all these can be done easily in a single place in the Mediterranean: Cyprus.

According to the legend, Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty and fertility, emerged from the waters of the sea next to a rock on the south coast of Cyprus, and within a gigantic shell was brought to earth. Thanks to the legend, the Cypriots have built temples to adore it and even today the most desperate women travel to this island in the Mediterranean last corner to tie ribbons on the trees surrounding rock Petra tou Romiou, seeking a slippery fertility or of an elusive love. Swim around Aphrodite’s Rock with full moon, returns a year of youth per turn, the legend says. The myth also says that Aphrodite was bathing in a cave in clear water when Adonis appeared, so the water from the Fountain of Love, restores youth. Moreover, after drinking the spring water you fall in love with the first person in its path.

While myths like these have brought curious and pilgrims to Cyprus for over twenty centuries, geography and history bring millions of travellers every year to explore a country that in just 240 kilometres long (one hundred kilometres at its widest part), has extensive white sand beaches, countless archaeological sites, ancient Orthodox churches and modern cities. Although the island enjoys a long summer for most part of the year, in the short winter you can go and ski in the mountains.

The modern Cyprus, with a population of just one million inhabitants, is the result of inheritance of Greeks, Romans, Turks, Venetians and English. All civilisations and all conquerors have passed by and let their prints in here. Dozens of Roman ruins were built on remnants of previous Greek cities, mosques are there as a result of the Ottoman conquest and the location just 75 kilometres south of Turkey, Orthodox Greek monasteries are everywhere while the British presence since the late nineteenth century until independence in 1960, have left in the Cypriots a very typically English kindness and humour.