Picnic Sites

The picnic site is a genuinely Cypriot institution and one that visitors tend to discover by accident. These are laid-out sites in state forest, most of them with stone tables, barbecue points, drinking water, toilets and parking under the trees, and at weekends they fill with families who have driven up from the coast with the whole day’s food. They are free to use. This site documents 39 picnic sites, listed by district further down the page.

Where they are

Nicosia district has the most at 15, largely because the Troodos forest reaches into it. Paphos has 10, mostly in the Paphos Forest and around the Akamas. Limassol has 9 in the southern Troodos, and Larnaca and Famagusta have two each — the flatter, drier, farmed end of the island has far less forest to put them in.

Some worth the drive

Stavros tis Psokas, deep in the Paphos Forest, is the remotest of them and sits next to the forest station where the island’s remaining moufflon are kept. Smigies, above Neo Chorio, is the base for walking on the Akamas and the start of a nature trail of the same name. Platania, on the Troodos–Kakopetria road, is the large, shaded, easy one that most people mean when they say they are going for a picnic in the mountains.

Others are attached to something else worth stopping for. Asinou Picnic Site sits below one of the finest painted churches on the island. Xyliatos Dam and Prodromos Dam look over reservoirs. Athalassa and Rizoelia are the two that are genuinely close to a city, on the edges of Nicosia and Larnaca respectively, and are the practical choice if you have an afternoon rather than a day.

Using them

Nothing needs booking and nothing is charged. Tables are taken on a first-come basis, and on a Sunday in spring the popular sites in the Troodos are busy by mid-morning. Bring your own charcoal and everything else — there are no shops at most of these sites and the nearest village may be some distance down the mountain.

The one thing to take seriously is fire. Cyprus is dry from roughly May to October and the forest burns easily; barbecue use is restricted in the high-risk months and sometimes prohibited outright, and lighting a fire anywhere other than a built barbecue point is not permitted at any time of year. Take rubbish away with you, since collection at the remoter sites is infrequent.

When to go

Spring and autumn are the best of it. In high summer the mountain sites are the reason these places exist — at 1,000 metres and up it can be ten degrees cooler than Limassol, and the shade is real shade. In winter the higher sites can be under snow, and several are closed or unreachable.