Limassol

Limassol spent antiquity in the shadow of grander neighbours. To the east stood Amathus, a city-kingdom and a centre of the Aphrodite cult; to the west, Kourion, with its Greco-Roman theatre still cut into the cliff above the sea. Both were ruined and abandoned by the early Middle Ages, and the modest port between them, Lemesos, quietly outlived them both. Its moment in the chronicles came in 1191, when tradition holds that Richard the Lionheart, who had seized Cyprus after part of his crusader fleet was wrecked on its shore, married Berengaria of Navarre in the chapel of the castle here. The squat fort you visit today is not that building: it is an Ottoman rebuild of around 1590, raised on the older fortifications and now holding the Cyprus Medieval Museum. Under the Lusignans and Venetians the town grew into a wine and trading port, and the wine never left. That is still the pattern. Limassol is the heart of the Cypriot wine trade, with the old KEO and ETKO wineries in town and the Commandaria villages in the Troodos foothills just to the north. In recent decades it has become the island's business capital too, its coast now a line of towers, a yacht marina, and, out at Zakaki, the City of Dreams Mediterranean, which opened in 2023 as the first integrated casino resort in Europe.