Sea Caves in Cyprus: there are two of them, 200 km apart

Cyprus has two completely separate places called the Sea Caves, and they are at opposite ends of the island. One is on the coast near Peyia, north of Coral Bay in the Paphos district. The other is inside Cape Greco National Forest Park, between Ayia Napa and Protaras. Driving between them is 200 km and takes close to three hours. If you have saved a photograph and assumed it is near your hotel, that is the fact to check first.

The two look alike in photographs, pale limestone and very blue water, but they make different days out. One has deep water that people swim and jump into. The other is a rock shelf where the sea is usually too rough for that, and where the real attraction is a rusting cargo ship.

Search results do nothing to help. The first page for “sea caves cyprus” carries two different Tripadvisor listings, one for each location, without either acknowledging that the other exists, alongside a boat tour for the eastern caves, a Facebook post about the western ones, and a Rightmove page selling property in a Peyia suburb that is also called Sea Caves.

Which Sea Caves do you mean?

	Peyia, Paphos district	Cape Greco, near Ayia Napa
Where	West coast, north of Coral Bay	South east headland, between Ayia Napa and Protaras
Nearest resort	Coral Bay, 11 minutes	Ayia Napa 12 minutes, Protaras 11 minutes
From the airport	Paphos, 43 minutes	Larnaca, 58 minutes
Shore	Flat limestone shelf, no sand	Cliffs and cave mouths, no sand
Swimming	Usually rough, most people don’t	Deep, clear, popular, no lifeguard
The draw	The Edro III shipwreck and the erosion shelf	The cave openings themselves and cliff jumping
Marked trail	No official trail; informal rocky paths	Yes, 4 km linear, signposted
Cost	Free, no gate	Free, no gate
Tripadvisor	4.4 from 481 reviews	4.6 from 1,122 reviews

The short version: if you want to swim, go east. If you want the shipwreck, go west. If you are staying in Paphos and someone has shown you a photograph of people leaping into turquoise water through a cave arch, that photograph is almost certainly Cape Greco, and it is a full day’s round trip away.

The western Sea Caves, near Peyia

These sit on the Akamas-facing coast north of Coral Bay, about 18 km and 29 minutes from Paphos harbour, or 6 km and 11 minutes from Coral Bay itself. From Paphos airport, allow about 43 minutes.

What you actually find is a low, flat shelf of pale rock that the sea has undercut into arches and hollows, with the water working away at it below. There is no beach and no sand. The ground near the edge is uneven and in places undercut, which is the main reason to keep back from it: the shelf is being eroded from underneath, and that is precisely what makes it photogenic.

Even the location is doubled. Mapping data returns two distinct points called Sea Caves in Peyia, one up at Agios Georgios and another closer to Coral Bay, several kilometres apart along the same coast. Adding to it, Sea Caves is also the name of the residential district on the clifftop above, which is why property listings keep appearing in the search results and why it turns up in our guide to the best places to live in Cyprus. If someone mentions living at the Sea Caves, they mean the neighbourhood, not the rocks.

The Edro III

The reason most visitors come is a cargo ship sitting on the rocks just offshore, tilted at eleven or twelve degrees and slowly going orange.

The Edro III was built in Norway in 1966, at Kaldnes Mekaniske Verksted in Tønsberg. She is over 80 metres long, somewhere around 2,300 to 2,500 tons, and was sailing under a Sierra Leone flag from Limassol to Rhodes with a cargo of plasterboard when she ran aground in heavy seas in December 2011. All nine crew, seven Albanians and two Egyptians, were airlifted off by a British military helicopter. Nobody was hurt.

The salvage that followed dealt with the danger rather than the ship. A Cypriot marine salvage company, working with the German firm CIMEXTA, removed the diesel, hydrocarbons and marine pollutants and made the hull watertight, finishing in October 2013. Towing attempts were abandoned as impractical, and there are officially no plans to remove her. Nearly fifteen years on she is effectively part of the coastline, and the single most photographed object on this stretch of the west coast.

Is it worth the trip?

It is worth an hour, not a day, and works best bolted onto something else. Time it for sunset: the wreck faces west and the light does the work, and a couple of clifftop bar terraces turn a fifteen minute photo stop into an evening.

Pair it with Coral Bay for the swim you cannot have here, or run north into the Akamas peninsula and on towards Lara Beach. One caution if you are planning that day: Avakas Gorge remains temporarily closed, according to the Visit Cyprus nature trails listing, despite a great deal of material online still describing it as open. Do not build the itinerary around it.

You need a car. There is no useful bus, and parking is informal ground near the cliffs rather than a car park, so our car hire guide is worth a look first.

The eastern Sea Caves, at Cape Greco

These are inside Cape Greco National Forest Park, a Natura 2000 site on the headland between the two big eastern resorts. From Ayia Napa it is about 7 km and 12 minutes; from Protaras, 6 km and 11 minutes. From Larnaca airport, allow just under an hour.

This is the version most people have in their heads: a run of white cliffs honeycombed with openings at the waterline, deep blue water directly below, and no sand anywhere. People swim here, and people jump from the rocks. It is genuinely popular and genuinely unmanaged, which is a combination worth taking seriously. There is no lifeguard, no marked entry point and no depth signage. UK Foreign Office advice for Cyprus notes that bathing is generally safe but that there can be strong waves and currents, and advises following warning signs and swimming only on approved beaches. This is not an approved beach. Judge the swell before you commit to anything, and remember that getting out of the water onto rock is much harder than getting in.

The official trail nobody mentions

There is a signposted route here, and the Deputy Ministry of Tourism publishes proper figures for it that no page on the first results page reproduces.

Sea Caves to Agioi Anargyroi trail
Length	4 km, linear
Indicative time	1.5 hours
Start altitude	13 m
Highest point	30 m
End altitude	13 m
Start points	The Sea Caves, or Agioi Anargyroi church
Connects to	Konnoi to Agioi Anargyroi trail, and the Aphrodite Trail

Seventeen metres of climb across four kilometres is the useful number: this is a flat coastal walk, not a hike, and the difficulty is the sun and the sharp limestone rather than the gradient. Much of it runs alongside the shoreline, crossing rocky ground with sparse salt-tolerant plants before turning inland through low scrub and a stretch of cereal fields. You pass the natural arch known as Kamara tou Koraka, the Bridge of Lovers, on the way.

It ends at the Agioi Anargyroi chapel, which is built directly over a sea cave where the saints it is named for are said to have lived as ascetics. That answers a question people keep asking about caves near Protaras: yes, there is one, and it has a church on top of it. About 200 metres west of the end of the trail there is a picnic site with drinking water, which is the only reliable water on the route.

The whole headland rewards more than a photo stop. Our Cape Greco guide covers it properly, and Konnos Bay at the western edge of the park is where to go if you want to finish the morning on actual sand. From the Protaras side, the Protaras beaches guide sets out the alternatives.

Can you actually go inside them?

Partly, and less than the photographs suggest. At both ends of the island you are mostly looking at the caves, from the clifftop above or from the rock at the water’s edge. Several of the best openings are only reachable by boat or by swimming to them.

Boat trips are the honest answer if you want to be inside an arch rather than standing above one. They run from Ayia Napa harbour along the Cape Greco coast in season, and on the west coast the same idea applies from Latchi, where the Blue Lagoon trips take in the Akamas coastline and its caves. A boat also removes the judgement call about swell, which on this coast is the part most likely to go wrong.

Getting the day right

Go early or go late. The middle of the day is the worst of both, hard light for photographs and no shade at either site. Cape Greco is busiest from mid-morning through the afternoon in summer; Peyia stays quiet until the sunset crowd arrives.

Wear shoes with a proper sole, because both places are sharp, uneven limestone and flip-flops are the common mistake. Take water, since there is none for sale at either, and take everything away with you: neither site has bins, staff or facilities of any kind.

Then check what you are looking at before you drive. If the picture has a rusting ship in it, you want Peyia. If it has people in the water under a cliff full of holes, you want Cape Greco. Nearly three hours separates the two, which is a long way to go to find the wrong coastline.

Hero image: Meereshöhlen von Ayia Napa by dronepicr, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Cropped.