Limassol Municipal Garden

The Limassol Municipal Garden sits on the coastal road in the middle of the city. Recently renovated, it works as a small piece of countryside inside the town — close to the sea and to the centre, and yet it does not feel like either.

The garden is over a hundred years old and covers 60,000 m². An open-air amphitheatre stands within it, hosting dance and theatre through the year. It seats 1,800, tickets go through the Garden Theatre box office and online, and in 2017 it was renamed after Marios Tokas, the Limassol-born composer of traditional music.

The trees and the shade

Eucalyptus, pine and cypress grow here, along with a great many flowering plants, and there are restaurants and cafés and somewhere for children to play. The planting is dense enough that the coastal road all but disappears once you are a few steps in.

The Wine Festival

For twelve days at the end of August into early September, the garden becomes the setting for the Limassol Wine Festival — one of the city’s best-known annual celebrations, and running since 1961. Cypriot wineries set up along the paths for tastings, there are demonstrations of how wine was made in the past, and grape products go on sale alongside music and dancing into the evening. The festival’s own slogan, “Πίνε ζωή να ’σιεις ζωήν” — “drink life, to have life” — sums up the mood well enough.

Ballet festivals, flower festivals, carnival events and Kataklismos, the Flood Festival, also take place in the amphitheatre and grounds through the year, so there is usually something cultural on.

Outside festival season, it is simply shade and quiet — a stroll, a lunch or a coffee, and an hour away from the traffic on the other side of the hedge.