Troodos

The Εθνικό Δασικό Πάρκο Τροόδους is the summit block of the range that made the island: 9,147 hectares around Chionistra — the ancients' Olympos — whose 1,952 metres are the highest ground on Cyprus. What the mountain is made of matters more than how high it stands. Troodos is an ophiolite, a slab of Cretaceous ocean crust and upper mantle heaved above sea level intact, and among geologists it passes for the most complete example on Earth: the whole oceanic sequence — pillow lavas, the sheeted dykes that fed them, gabbros, and at the dome's centre the mantle rocks themselves — lies exposed in road cuttings and stream beds in the wrong order, mantle at the top, because the uplift domed the stack and erosion opened it from the middle. Since 2015 the wider massif has carried UNESCO Global Geopark status, and the park is its core exhibit.

The forest is the other half of the story. Above about 1,400 metres the Calabrian pine of the lower slopes gives way to black pine, some trees several centuries old, standing over a shrub layer of golden oak — Quercus alnifolia, an endemic that grows nowhere on Earth but these mountains and is the closest thing Cypriot botany has to an emblem. Stinking juniper twists along the summit ridge. The high ground is an island on an island, and it shows in the endemics: the Troodos races of coal tit, jay, short-toed treecreeper and crossbill live up here in the pines, and spring brings narrow-range plants — Troodos rock-cress among them — that follow the snow line up the scree.

People have used this height hard. The Kryos stream drops through the Caledonia falls below Troodos square; the British strung a summer hill station along the ridge in the 1880s and their successors keep the white radar domes on Chionistra; and on the park's northeastern edge gapes the terraced crater of the Amiantos asbestos mine, worked from 1904 to 1988 and now slowly being grafted back into forest — the geopark's visitor centre sits in its old buildings. In winter the north-facing runs above Sun Valley carry one of the Mediterranean's southernmost ski operations, a fact Cypriots deploy on visitors with some pleasure: sea swimming and skiing in the same February day is occasionally, genuinely possible.

What's worth knowing before you go

Troodos square, at almost 1,700 metres, is the hub — reachable in about an hour from Limassol or Nicosia — with Platres, the old colonial hill resort just below the boundary, the pleasanter overnight base. The classic walks are the waymarked quartet laid out decades ago and still the island's best: Artemis, the level loop around Chionistra through the oldest black pines; Atalanti, its longer, lower sibling; Caledonia, down the falls to Platres; and Persephone, an easy out-and-back to a viewpoint over half the island. Spring and early summer are the season — the mountain runs ten degrees cooler than Nicosia, which in July is the whole point. The connoisseur's stop is the road cutting: the geopark marks sites where you can put a hand on the fossil boundary between crust and mantle, a contact geologists elsewhere drill kilometres for.