Liopetri

The Εθνικό Δασικό Πάρκο Δάσους Λιοπετρίου is 89 hectares of pine on the coastal strip of the Kokkinochoria — the red-soil potato villages of the Famagusta corner — declared in 1984 as the second use of the national forest park category and its first outside Nicosia. The wood stands behind the shore between the village of Liopetri and the sea, Calabrian pine and acacia on pale marl that reads almost white against the famous red fields inland, and it exists for the plainest of reasons: on a coast being converted at speed to greenhouses and holiday lets, the state forest was the piece the Forest Department could hold.

The landscape's celebrity is the water feature at its edge. The Potamos tou Liopetriou is a drowned creek mouth — a ribbon of sea some six hundred metres long and a few boat-widths wide that pushes inland between low rock walls like a pocket fjord, and it shelters the area's fishing fleet: working boats moored gunwale to gunwale below fishermen's self-built huts, with nets drying on the rock and the chapel of Agios Georgios watching the entrance. It is one of the most painted and photographed corners of the district — Arthur Rimbaud is said to have overseen a quarry gang on this shore in 1879, the first of his two Cyprus stints — and the creek's inclusion alongside the forest completed the local Natura 2000 site.

Liopetri village itself carries heavier history a kilometre inland: the Achyronas barn, where four EOKA fighters died in a surrounded last stand on 2 September 1958, is one of the independence struggle's principal memorials. The park makes no claim on that story — it is a working pine wood with picnic shade — but the pairing of memorial village and protected creek is what gives this small park its place in the district's identity, and the reason its name means more to Cypriots than 89 hectares would suggest.

What's worth knowing before you go

Come for the creek, stay for the wood: the mooring channel of the Potamos, best in low evening light when the boats come in, is among the last genuinely working-vernacular corners of this coast, with a fish tavern at the mouth doing what fish tavernas at working moorings do. The forest paths behind are flat, sandy and unwaymarked — a half-hour's pine-shaded stroll, welcome in a district otherwise stripped of shade. Spring and autumn are best; the E4 path and the district's cycling routes pass close. The connoisseur's detail is agricultural: the surreal colour boundary where the white marl of the forest strip meets the deep red aeolian soils of the potato fields — the Kokkinochoria's name, "the red villages", explained in a single field edge.