Savour the Akamas

At some point in my childhood, my uncle ironically put forward that Cyprus, our little Mediterranean island was to potentially sink under the burdening weight of concrete.

If I recall well, this must have been at the end of the 90s when hotels, tourist villages and development on the island were at their peak.

This marked the beginning of the disappearance of our untouched shorelines and stretches of unblemished beaches found in the likes of Ayia Napa and Paphos.

I remember making detours to avoid coming across the – excuse me – ugly sight of our coastline that reminisced the likes of the cheap holiday destinations on the destroyed coasts of Spain.
I always wondered why we didn’t take our example from places such as Ibiza, that boom for a couple of years and then revert to melancholically remembering how things once were and attempt to recall and in some cases deconstruct/reconstruct the likes of how things use to be.

Some companies may assert that their development plans in the Akamas are in line with the ecosystem; that they are conscious of nature’s delights and are not in for its destruction.

The point being missed, however, is that Akamas’ flora-and-fauna protected area under Natura 2000 is not negotiating whether it is willing to accept a coinciding development, of any sort.
Any form of development puts its reality in danger. Anything that will accommodate humans spending more time than we already do in the area should be out of the question.

There are ample hotels, bungalows, apartments, swimming pools, water parks, golf courses, spas, tourist attractions and so on around, most of these being half empty and incapable of meeting any form of standard to be able to function properly.

Why would we go and start all over again in a protected area, when we haven’t figured out the existing horrors that have taken over enough of the island’s beauty?

Any rationalisation to intervene into Akamas’ beauty is simply unacceptable.