Lara Beach

Lara is the beach you reach when you have run out of road. It sits near the tip of the Akamas peninsula, the last wild corner of Cyprus, and getting there means a slow jolting track that rental cars are often not insured to drive. That difficulty is the whole point. Lara has been left undeveloped on purpose, because its golden sand is one of the most important loggerhead and green turtle nesting sites in the Mediterranean, and the reward for the effort is a long open bay with almost nothing on it but sand, scrub and sea.

What you get in return for the drive is space and silence. The sand runs in a generous arc, the water is clean and clear, and the only structures are the wire cages the conservation team place over turtle nests through the summer. Come early and you may have a stretch of it close to yourself, which is something you simply cannot say of Nissi or Fig Tree Bay in the same season. It is a beach for walking, for swimming, and for feeling how this coast looked before the resorts arrived.

The honest read is that Lara asks something of you. There is no sunbed to rent, no bar for a cold drink, no shade once the sun is high, and no lifeguard if the water turns. The track in is genuinely rough and best tackled in a high vehicle, and the parking is informal. None of this is a flaw, it is the deal that keeps the bay wild, but you have to arrive self sufficient with water, food, sun cover and a bag to carry your litter back out.

Who should skip it. If you want an easy family day with paddling, sunbeds and lunch on tap, Coral Bay further south does that far better and with far less effort. Lara is for people who value the wild over the convenient, who will respect the nesting season and keep to the open sand, and who understand that the best thing about this beach is everything it deliberately does not have.