Fortunately, Paphos's main cultural attractions are a brief beachside stroll from the hotel. Within ten minutes, we had arrived at its 14th-century fort, which was destroyed by the Venetians a century later and subsequently remodelled by the Ottomans. At the top, you get a fabulous view in all directions: ours was of the town band below, launching into 'Colonel Bogey' as a classic-car rally got under way (driving on the left – a legacy of nearly 100 years of British rule). It was all rather English, apart from the glorious weather, of course.
So we strolled slowly past the shiny Morgans and E-type Jags, licking our ice creams (startlingly, the vendor insisted on giving us all an extra scoop for nothing), and five minutes later, we were entering the site of Paphos's Archaeological Park. You'd be forgiven for thinking it was a nature reserve; the skylarks dart in the blue sky and the ground is ablaze with wild flowers in purple, pink and gold. In the midst of this natural bounty stands an incredible collection of ruins, dating from the 2nd and 3rd century AD when Paphos was the capital of Cyprus, rediscovered by a farmer's plough in the 1960s. The House of Dionysus is the largest and most impressive, with almost 600sq ft of floor space covered with intricate mosaics – from patterns and peacocks to mythological scenes of Pyramus and Thisbe, Apollo and Daphne, Zeus and Ganymede, and, of course, the god of wine himself, boozing as hard as the lobster-hued Brits outside the park's perimeter. But here, just as in the Almyra, the more tawdry realities of modern tourism could not touch us.
