Cyprus Lakes

In a climate this dry, standing water is scarce enough to be an event. Cyprus has only five natural lakes — all of them salt or semi-salt, and most of them seasonal — and everything else is man-made, held behind a dam or dug as a storage reservoir. That scarcity is the point: the lakes concentrate the island’s birdlife into a handful of places. This site documents 8 lakes, listed by district further down the page.

The salt lakes

The Larnaca Salt Lake is the best known of them. It lies just south-west of the city beside the airport and the mosque of Hala Sultan Tekke, and despite the name it is not one lake but a linked network of them. The Limassol Salt Lake on the Akrotiri peninsula is the other large one, a few minutes from the shopping centres and completely unlike them.

Further east, Oroklini Lake and Paralimni Lake are seasonal wetlands protected for their wildlife, and Athalassa Lake sits inside the national forest park on the edge of Nicosia, the easiest of the five to reach on foot from a city.

The unexpected ones

Kokkinopezoula near Mitsero is the one nobody forgets. Known simply as the Red Lake, it fills a disused open-cast mine and its water carries a deep rust-red colour from the minerals left behind — eerie, entirely accidental, and among the most photographed spots in the Nicosia district.

Almirolivado is at the other extreme: a small lake high in the Troodos near the old Amiantos mines, reached only on foot along a rough nature trail with some steep ground. Ergates Lake is a quiet spot in the Nicosia countryside that few visitors ever hear about.

When to go

Timing matters more here than almost anywhere else on the island. The natural lakes fill with winter rain and dry back over the summer, some of them completely, so a lake photographed as a sheet of water in February can be a cracked salt pan by August. Winter and early spring are the season for all of them, and for the migrating waterbirds that break their journey between Africa and Europe on the island. For the man-made reservoirs, see Cyprus dams.