Paphos; Saturday, 15 October, 2022

After the previous days early start I had a bit of a lie in and was quite late down for breakfast, which turned out to be a mistake as the calm quiet of the previous day had been replaced with a manic free for all.

The battle of breakfast completed I headed out into town, walking along the seafront and continuing round through the harbour to the castle.

There has been a castle in the harbour since at least the Byzantine time, but the current castle leaves much of its design and layout to the short Venetian period. I spent a little while looking round the castle – though there is little inside, but the views from the roof over the harbour and lower part of Paphos were quite good.

The castle, along with Fabrika Hill, form part of the Ancient Paphos archaeological site, but to stop having to fence off large parts of the city only the core is actually being an entrance fee in the archaeological park, and that’s where I headed to next. The park houses a number of different structures from the Ancient Greek and Roman periods through to the time of the Knights of St John and the Ottoman period.

Some of the most impressive parts of the site were the mosaics many dotted around in the open air, though with a period of bad weather forecast many of those had been covered by sand to protect them.

It was at this point that my camera decided to give up the ghost, or more critically the SD card decided to corrupt itself, so from then on rather than taking photos I just wandered round the rest of the site past the remains of a Roman Agora and theatre to the Knights era castle – in used until it was destroyed by another on Cyprus’ devastating earthquakes.

Of course, I’d chosen the best time to wander round an open-air archaeological site, middle of the day. By the time I’d finished looking round the site I was quite tired and very sweaty, so I headed back to the hotel to freshen up, including a shower as I had a spa treatment booked in for the early evening.

As part of the hotel package, it had included a free spa treatment, so I’d opted for a massage, which was very pleasant and at the end made me seriously consider just going straight to bed, but instead I watched the sunset from my room balcony with a glass of wine and then headed down for dinner.

After dinner I headed back to my room and dropped off quite quickly.