Petra tou Romiou

The Εθνικό Δασικό Πάρκο Πέτρας του Ρωμιού is the amphitheatre of white slopes rising behind the most famous view in Cyprus: the dark sea stack on the Paphos coast where, in the myth Hesiod set down, Aphrodite rose from the foam and stepped ashore. The park, declared in 2001 over 349 hectares, is not the beach and not the rock — its boundary runs along the top of the shore, and the stack itself stands on the foreshore a few metres below the line — but the sweep of chalk hills, planted pine and garrigue that frames the scene from above, crossed by the old coast road and the modern one, with the viewpoint lay-bys that make this the island's most photographed kilometre.

The geology is nearly as good as the myth. The rocks here belong to the Mamonia complex — a chaos of Triassic and Jurassic sea-floor slivers, older than the Troodos ophiolite behind them, that was crushed against and under the rising massif and now surfaces along this coast as exotic blocks in a softer matrix. The stack and its attendant reefs are exactly such blocks, harder limestone left standing as the chalks around them wasted back; the goddess was born, geologically speaking, from a tectonic collision zone. The Greek name records a second, later legend: Petra tou Romiou is the Rock of the Roman — the Byzantine frontier hero Digenis Akritas — who is said to have hurled it at Saracen raiders from the heights the park now occupies.

The setting has been sacred ground for close to three millennia with barely a break. On the ridge just west, at Kouklia, stood Palaipafos and its sanctuary of Aphrodite — one of the ancient world's great pilgrimage destinations, part of the Paphos World Heritage listing today — and the rites that Roman authors describe began with the sea and the shore below. The park is thus a rare thing in the atlas: a protected area whose primary value is a view and its mythological freight, the state forest serving as the frame a national icon is displayed in.

What's worth knowing before you go

The site sits on the B6 between Paphos and Limassol; the safe access to the beach is the underpass from the main car park, and the swimming — across slippery pebbles into deep, current-prone water — is more baptism than bathing. Local lore offers immortality, or at least eternal beauty, to whoever swims three circuits of the rock; the coastguard's view of night attempts is dimmer. Sunset is the hour the coaches come for, deservedly; dawn is as good and empty. The connoisseur's move is to pair the rock with Kouklia's sanctuary and museum on the hill above — the myth reads differently once you have seen the conical black stone, aniconic and strange, that stood for the goddess there long before sculptors gave her a body.