Golden Beach

The wild one, and worth the long drive to the tip of the Karpas Peninsula: a genuinely undeveloped sweep of golden sand running for kilometres behind rolling dunes, with barely a building in sight. This is one of the Mediterranean's last great turtle beaches — loggerhead and green turtles haul out to nest here through the summer, so stretches are roped off and there's no resort machinery to spoil it. You might share the sand with a few of the peninsula's free-roaming wild donkeys, ambling down from the scrub. Bring everything — water, shade, food — because there's next to nothing here but sand, sea and space. That's the whole point.