Ten days in Cyprus: drive past the resorts and the island gets interesting

Land, collect the car, and do nothing ambitious. The harbour at Paphos is a short curve of water with fishing boats, a line of restaurants and a squat stone fort at the end of the breakwater.

The fort has been a Byzantine castle, a Lusignan tower, a Venetian ruin, an Ottoman rebuild of 1586 and a British salt store, which is roughly the history of the whole island in one small building. It takes fifteen minutes and the roof is the best place to watch the light go.

Then eat inland rather than on the front. The tavernas a street or two back from the water are cheaper and considerably better.

The archaeological park starts at the harbour and covers most of the headland. What everybody comes for is the floors: the House of Dionysos and the House of Theseus were rich Roman villas, and their mosaic floors survived under the soil almost intact, hunting scenes and myth panels laid out room by room. Go at opening, because the covered halls get hot and the site has no trees.

At the upper end of the park is a small odeon cut into the rock, restored and still used for summer performances, with a view over the whole site and the sea beyond.

In the afternoon, the Tombs of the Kings, a kilometre or so north along the shore. No king was ever buried in them. They are the rock cut tombs of Ptolemaic officials, some of them carved as complete underground courtyards with columns around them, and you climb down into the ground to see it. Late afternoon light in them is much the best.

An easy hour on the motorway, and the two best stops on the whole drive are on the way. Kourion sits on a cliff above the sea about forty minutes east of Paphos: a Greek and Roman city with a theatre cut into the slope, still used for performances, and mosaic floors under modern roofs behind it. Arrive before eleven, because there is no shade at all.

The sanctuary of Apollo is two kilometres further along the same road, quieter and, for some, the better half: a rebuilt colonnade, a temple front, and open country in every direction.

Twenty minutes on is Kolossi, a single square keep rebuilt in the fifteenth century by the Knights Hospitaller, who ran the sugar mills and vineyards around it and gave their name to Commandaria, the sweet wine still made in these hills. Climb it, then drive the last quarter of an hour into Limassol and eat in the old carob warehouses beside the castle.

The castle behind the marina is where Richard the Lionheart, blown off course on the Third Crusade in 1191, is said to have married Berengaria of Navarre. The building itself is mostly a later Ottoman rebuild and holds the island's medieval museum, and the roof gives you the old town and the port together.

Ten minutes east along the coast are the remains of Amathus, one of the ancient city kingdoms of Cyprus, lived in for around two thousand years and then abandoned. The agora with its re-erected columns is at road level; the acropolis and its temple to Aphrodite are up the hill behind.

Then take the afternoon off on the shore, and eat a fish meze in the evening. It arrives as fifteen or twenty small dishes over a couple of hours and it is the best meal on this trip, so do not have lunch.

An hour north on the motorway across the plain, and the temperature climbs as the sea disappears behind you. Park the car for three days; you will not need it again until Larnaca.

Start at Eleftheria Square, a long white concrete deck laid over the Venetian moat, then walk up Ledra Street into the old town. Halfway along it are two passport booths and the line between the Republic of Cyprus and the north, which you can look at today and cross tomorrow.

Go up the observation floor on the tower block that sticks out of the medieval skyline. From up there the buffer zone is not an idea but a visible strip of collapsed roofs and shuttered shops with the northern half carrying on beyond it. Then find Faneromeni Square, which was the centre of the city until 1974, and eat at one of the tables around it.

The Cyprus Museum, just outside the walls by the Paphos Gate, is the best museum on the island and the one that ties the whole trip together. It runs from the Neolithic to the end of antiquity, and what you have been walking around at Paphos, Kourion and Amathus is largely in here: the Roman bronze of Septimius Severus, gold out of the tombs at Salamis, and a room of some two thousand small terracotta figures found standing in rows at a sanctuary.

In the afternoon, the Leventis Municipal Museum tells Nicosia's own story in a restored townhouse, from the Bronze Age through the Lusignans, Venetians, Ottomans and British, in about an hour.

Finish beside the Archbishop's Palace at the Byzantine Museum, which holds hundreds of Orthodox icons, including panels recovered after being taken from churches on the other side of the line.

Passport in a pocket, walk up Ledra Street, show it at one booth and then at another, and you are in the north. The big things are identical, the same sandstone lanes and the same heat, and the small ones are not: different flags, different alphabet, prices in lira.

Büyük Han is five minutes in. Built in 1572, just after the Ottoman conquest, it is a caravanserai on the model of the one at Bursa, two galleried storeys of rooms around a courtyard with a small domed mosque standing in the middle. Merchants stabled animals below and slept above. It is craft workshops and a cafe now, and the courtyard is worth an hour of doing nothing.

Round the corner is the Selimiye Mosque, begun in 1209 as the cathedral of Saint Sophia and unmistakably French Gothic: pointed arches, a rose window, buttresses, and two minarets added after 1570. Inside it was whitewashed and the carpets laid at an angle to the nave so that the rows face Mecca, and the effect is one of the strangest things in Cyprus. Shoes off, shoulders covered, and not at prayer times.

Forty minutes back down to the coast, and Larnaca is a relief after the inland heat: a seafront of palm trees and sand with the airport visible along the bay.

The church of Saint Lazarus in the middle of town dates from the ninth century and is built over what is claimed as the tomb of the Lazarus of the gospels, who by tradition came to Cyprus after Bethany and served as the first bishop of the town. The crypt is down a few steps behind the iconostasis and is the reason to go in.

The district archaeological museum a few streets away is small and unfussy, running from prehistory to Rome, and worth forty minutes before dinner. Then eat Cypriot in the old Turkish quarter behind the fort rather than on the promenade.

Behind the airport road is a shallow salt lake that dries to a white crust every summer and fills every winter, and from November into March it holds flocks of flamingos deep enough to be worth the walk out.

On the far shore stands Hala Sultan Tekke, a small domed mosque in a grove of palms and cypresses, built around a tomb held to be that of Umm Haram, a relative of the Prophet who died here in the seventh century. It is one of the most respected Muslim sites in the eastern Mediterranean and, on a weekday morning, almost silent.

Then spend the afternoon in the sea. The bay in front of the town is shallow and the wind picks up in the afternoon, which is why the windsurfing schools are here rather than anywhere else on this coast.

Larnaca airport is on the far side of the salt lake, about a quarter of an hour from the seafront, which makes the last morning the easiest of the trip. Have breakfast on the promenade, swim if the flight is late enough, and drop the car at the terminal.

If you have an afternoon flight, the fort at the southern end of the beach is fifteen minutes and free, and the covered market a street inland is where to buy halloumi and dried figs to take home.