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About Cyprus Spirit

Cyprus Spirit is an independent travel guide focused on a single country: Cyprus. We cover the Republic of Cyprus and Northern Cyprus — both sides of the island — with verified itineraries, fact-checked recommendations, and zero tour-sales pitch.

What we publish

  • 28 destination guides covering coastal cities, mountain villages, archaeological sites and traditional inland clusters.
  • 100+ topic guides on archaeology, wine routes, beaches, hiking, food, day trips, transport and seasonal planning.
  • 14 itineraries from 3-day breaks to 14-day full-island tours, including foodie, archaeology and hiking variants.
  • Travel tips on car rental, crossings, currency, visa and the things that surprise first-time visitors.
  • 4 free tools: budget calculator, beach finder, best-time-to-visit, north–south crossing planner.

Every page is published in eight languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch and Polish.

How we work

Every destination, guide and itinerary on this site is built on first-hand research, official sources and field-tested logistics. We name specific hotels, restaurants and operators when it matters, mention prices in EUR (with TRY references for the north), and quote driving times you can verify on Google Maps before you go.

When a section of the island runs hot, cold or seasonal — Troodos tavernas closing November to March, Ayia Napa pulsing past midnight in August, Mount Olympus catching snow in January — we say so. The aim is to publish the kind of page we'd want to read before booking ourselves.

Editorial principles

  • Honest framing. We flag the tourist traps: marina restaurants with inflated prices, "Greek night" dinner shows, hard-sell tour operators. And we point you to alternatives in the inland villages.
  • Both sides of the island. Northern Cyprus is administered by Turkey and recognized only by Turkey; the United Nations considers it occupied territory. We use the term Northern Cyprus as the most widely recognized neutral descriptor, and we cover its archaeology, food and landscape with the same care as the Republic. Travelers deserve the full picture.
  • No paid placements. We do not accept money for editorial mentions, reviews or rankings. The only commercial relationships we have are the GetYourGuide and Viator affiliate programs (see below).
  • No content fluff. Every page should help you make a decision — book this, skip that, time it like so. Pages that don't earn their place get cut.

Why you can trust this guide

Verified affiliate links

Every tour we recommend points to a real, live listing on GetYourGuide. Before each release we run two scripts — audit-gyg (offline structural audit) and check-gyg-http (live HTTP validation) — to catch removed tours, broken URLs or hijacked product IDs. We refuse to write speculative "you can probably book this" content; if a tour doesn't have a verifiable listing, it doesn't ship.

Reviewed dates on every page

Each destination, guide and itinerary shows a last reviewed date. When seasonality, prices, opening times or transport schedules change, that date moves. Pages with no recent review get re-checked or rewritten before they reappear in our seasonal cycle.

No invented detail

Hotel names, restaurant names, opening hours, distances, prices and crossing points are all sourced from published material we can cite — official tourism boards, restaurant menus, Google Maps measurements, GetYourGuide tour pages, or first-hand visits. We do not invent restaurant names or hotel addresses to look knowledgeable. If we mention Militzis in Larnaca, you can walk in and order kleftiko tomorrow.

Quick answers and FAQ blocks

Most guides open with a "quick answer" box and close with a short FAQ. Both are written so that a one-minute reader gets a usable answer, and a thirty-minute reader gets the full picture. We don't pad word counts.

How we make money

This site is free to read. We do not run ads, we do not run sponsored content, and we do not sell email addresses. The only revenue sources are the GetYourGuide and Viator (a Tripadvisor company) affiliate programs: when you book a tour through one of our links (marked clearly with "Check availability" or "From €X"), they pay us a small commission. Your price is identical to booking directly.

If we don't think a tour is worth your money, we don't link it — even if it would pay a commission.

See our full affiliate disclosure for the legal text.

What we don't do

  • We don't run our own tours, so we have no incentive to push you toward a specific operator.
  • We don't accept payment for editorial mentions, reviews or rankings.
  • We don't generate pages with AI alone — every published page is written or rewritten by Claude Sonnet 4.6 under a human editorial brief, with human review of facts, names and figures before release.
  • We don't farm out content to translation services that produce robotic text. The eight-language versions are model-translated and human-checked.

Northern Cyprus — the disclaimer

Northern Cyprus is administered by Turkey and recognized only by Turkey; the United Nations considers it occupied territory. We use the term Northern Cyprus throughout the site as the most widely recognized neutral descriptor. We mention crossing points (Ledra Street, Astromeritis, Agios Dometios and others) without dramatizing them, and we cover the archaeology, food and landscape of the north without political endorsement.

Travel insurance, car rental coverage and entry procedures differ between south and north. Read our crossing guide before you cross — particularly the section on car-rental green cards.

Publisher

Cyprus Spirit is published by Agence Xen, an independent web publisher.

Email: agencexen@gmail.com

For corrections, suggestions or factual disputes, the inbox is open. We update pages where we find we got something wrong.