by Karen Robinson of The Sunday Times

Cyprus is hot. And that’s not just the temperature — a steady sunbaked 80 degrees and more from May to October; the eastern Mediterranean island has made it onto the A-list as a holiday choice for the rich, the famous and the beautiful. The London businessman Philip Green took over the sybaritic Anassa hotel near Polis for his 50th birthday party in March 2001, when guests included Prince Albert of Monaco, Jeremy Beadle and Sir Stirling Moss and entertainment was provided by Rod Stewart. Other fans of the Anassa’s style of luxury (when you are sunbathing by one of the three pools, a man comes round handing out cold flannels to cool your overheated brow) are Emma Thompson and footballers Steve McManaman and Graeme Le Saux.

For decades, Cyprus’s reputation for holiday homes has been far from chic. The explosive expansion of the main towns — Larnaca, Limassol and Paphos — on the south and west coasts after the arrival of Greek Cypriots from the Turkish-occupied northern sector in 1974, coupled with an energetic attempt to get the economy back on track after the civil war that ended in the the division of the island, led to what Voula Tsangarides, a Nicosia-based PR executive calls “a lot of sudden building without too much thought. Now they are expanding on the quality side as a second home destination. Basically, they’ve stopped building the crap.”

Instead of one-bedders in small complexes, it’s villas with pools. As Tsangarides says: “You can come if you’ve got the dosh.”

So if recent Cyprus holidaymakers Zoe Ball and Fatboy Slim or Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones decide they fancy a home of their own on the island they might now be able to find something to suit their taste on the south and west coasts, at a discreet distance from the one-bed apartments for £50,000 and the two-bedders with sea view for £70,000 — at prices that give the Mediterranean’s traditional hot spots a run for their money.

Aphrodite Hills near Paphos is one place to start looking. “The first integrated golf, leisure and real-estate development in Cyprus,” in the words of Nicos Christoforou, sales manager for developer Cybarco’s houses there, is built on 578 acres of hillside split by a ravine and overlooking the turquoise Mediterranean close to the rocks that mark the legendary birthplace of the goddess Aphrodite. At the top end of the Cyprus market, it costs about £500,000 to buy a 1,500sq m plot of land and build a Cybarco villa with about 150sq m of living space and the same again of covered veranda, plus a pool. Two years ago you would only have paid £250,000 and Christoforou is happily anticipating the arrival of the £1m villa (and that’s £1m in Cyprus pounds, so nearer £1.25m sterling) within five years.

With a spa, tennis academy, hotel, 2,000-seat amphitheatre and a church on stream, to join the Cabell Robinson-designed golf course and, ultimately, 800 homes, Christoforou is convinced he is creating a community for “people who want to show off their money to similar people”.

British property hunters dominate the market. Crinos Levendis of Cybarco reckons the customers for his developments are 60% British, 15% well-off Cypriots and 15% Russian buyers.

While the Brits love Cyprus for its Englishness (they drive on the same side of the road, English is widely spoken and a special “double taxation treaty” means that resident Brits pay only 5% tax on their pensions), the Russians have a fondness for the place for its relative closeness to home and its shared Orthodox Christianity.

A host of other nationalities, especially northern Europeans and a leap in property prices are expected when Cyprus joins the European Union in May 2004. Loucas Kitrou, estate manager of Lanitis Development, another big builder on the island, reckons prices will leap by up to 20% next year. One reason is that as Cyprus law stands, you cannot let out your property for holiday rentals. Lefteris Constantinou, who is overseeing the creation of Possidon Beach Gardens, near Larnaca, reckons people have been doing it for years anyway, and nobody has ever been prosecuted, but a rush of investors is expected once the law is scrapped.

He already has one buyer, a Cypriot, in the new two-bed, one-bath apartments that form part of the beachfront estate (priced from £57,000 to £90,000 for a ground-floor flat with garden) who claims to have already let his apartment through the internet for £44 a day for the next two years.

“I see the market going on up. The EU will make people a lot more secure about buying in Cyprus,” says Michael Cartwright of Leptos Estates. “Next year there will be a marina for 1,800 boats in Paphos. This is the kind of thing that creates a more upmarket environment.”

His company is building two £800,000 villas. “Everyone is saying that one — a massive pale pink house of 450sq m — is for George Michael but I don’t believe it, as the client is German.”

Meanwhile, prices are soaring at Kamares village, a Leptos development five miles inland from Paphos that won awards in the 1990s: “The villas we are building have become enormous. People have a lot more money to spend.”

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