Kyrenia Castle

The heavy stone anchor at the east end of Kyrenia harbour: a 16th-century Venetian fortress raised over an older Crusader castle, its ramparts wide enough to walk the whole way around. Inside are a little chapel with reused Roman columns and the real treasure — the Shipwreck Museum, home to a Greek merchant ship that sank off this coast around 300 BC, one of the oldest recovered trading vessels anywhere. From the sea-facing walls you look straight down into the harbour's fishing boats and across to the mountains. It's the salt-stained counterweight to all that waterfront prettiness — solid, and genuinely old.