20 May 29, 2022The Sunday Times
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private landlord on the island — and the
second largest after the Orthodox Church.
He argues that the increasing demand
from foreign investors has raised the
quality of the housing stock. “But the way
it was done was wrong and it worked
against us, giving us a lot of bad publicity.”
In 1974, the year of the Greek coup
d’etat and subsequent Turkish invasion
of the island, Paphos was a tiny fishing
village. “You would come here 20
years ago and think, ‘How quaint,’
but compared to now it looked like
a dump,” Constantis says.
Leptos Estates has 20 projects under
construction on the island. Near to Coral
Beach Hotel, on the edge of the Akamas
peninsula, a national park and Unesco
reserve, it has built 63 villas known
as Coral Seas on land that was once a
banana plantation. The villas are in a
gated community and most have private
swimming pools; a communal gym andpool sit at the centre of the scheme. The
white villas are vast, spanning between
3,200 and 5,300 sq ft. Prices here go
from €690,000 (£585,000) for a three-
bedroom property on the back of the
estate up to €3.9 million for a
five-bedroom waterfront villa.
Driving up the olive tree-studded hills
around Paphos, Constantis shows me
another scheme: Kamares Village. Here
the properties don’t have the classic
Greek island style of white, clean
geometry, but a more traditional Cypriot
charm. “Externally, they look like
traditional Cypriot farmhouses with big
ceramic urns, but inside they are modern
and have all the comforts,” Constantis
says. Villas here range in price from
€300,000 all the way up to €5 million,
depending on location, size and
amenities. The developer also offers
investors the option to buy a plot of land
and build their own house.Sunshine, beaches... and generous tax breaks for
expats. Emanuele Midolo visits Cyprus — as the island
that was once a safe haven for Russians reinvents itself
WHAT MOSCOW ON
T
he 7am direct flight to
Cyprus on one Wednesday
this month was packed.
Passengers on the front row
of the plane had the red eyes
of people who had been awake all night,
but, undaunted, ordered gin and tonic.
By the time the plane was halfway through
the four-and-a-half-hour flight to Paphos
a hostess announced that we had run out
of prosecco. She was promptly booed by
the crowd.
It is the first full tourist season for
Cyprus since the start of the pandemic.
Temperatures here range from a pleasant
20C to a hot 35C, and this summer Brits
are having a free run of the island — the
easternmost country in the European
Union — and the property on offer, with
little foreign competition.
Until recently the island had gained
the nickname of Moscow on the Med
— or Cypruski — thanks to the number
of Russians, usually among the fiercest
home-hunters and thought to account for
about 40,000 of the island’s 1.2 million
population. In some areas the street signs
are in Greek, English and Russian.
The war in Ukraine has marked a
tipping point. Russians are no longer
allowed to travel and last month Cyprus’s
government decided to strip eight Russian
oligarchs of their Cypriot citizenship after
they were sanctioned by the EU. The
island has hosted about 15,000 Ukrainian
refugees since the invasion.
There is another reason why Russians
might not be as ubiquitous as before. Lastyear a government inquiry found that
more than half of the passports that
Cyprus issued between 2013 and 2019
via the “golden passport” programme —
through which the island was selling
Cypriot citizenship, and therefore EU
citizenship, to wealthy foreigners —
were illegal.
Locals argue that there has been an
upside. “The passport scheme has
actually improved the waterfront,”
says Costas Constantis, a sales executive
at Leptos Estates, a substantial local
property developer that is also the biggestAbove: Limassol.
Above right:
properties
in Kamares
Village, a new
development in
Paphos, start at
€440,000 for a
two-bedroom
villa through
Leptos Estates.
Below: PaphosKIRILL MAKAROV/ALAMYPaphos
Nicosia
CYPRUS
Limassol
20 miles