Almyra Hotel

The delightful Secret Valley holiday course opened for play in 1996 and local Cypriot Iacovos Iacovou originally designed it.

Voted the best course in Cyprus for two consecutive years by Golf Digest back in the late 1990s, Secret Valley Golf Club enjoyed all the limelight in those early years when golf was still a fledgling Cypriot sport. At that time, the island only had two courses to choose from and the Cyprus Golf Federation hadn’t yet been founded.

The setting really is a delight and it's definitely worth playing Secret Valley early in the morning or late in the evening when the shadows are lengthening. It's also cooler at either end of the day. In the middle of summer Secret Valley can get rather hot and sticky.

Nestled in the hills to the northeast of Paphos, the 18-hole layout at Minthis was originally designed by Donald Steel for Tsada Golf Club back to the mid-1990s, with holes laid out next to a 12th century monastery on land that was once owned by the Church of Cyprus. Early in the new millennium, Tom Mackenzie was engaged to upgrade the layout, rebuilding tees and bunkers, levelling fairways and installing a new irrigation system.

Property developers Pafilia then became partners in the project, introducing further investment. The old greens have been re-constructed and these new putting surfaces seeded with bent grass. Major back nine developments include a dramatic new par five 10th hole to the east of the property, a new short par three 13th and a terrific island green on the par three 15th.

Elea Golf Club is at the heart of a new, luxury residential development that is set in an idyllic spot, only two kilometres from the Mediterranean Sea and the vibrant town of Paphos. Golf in Cyprus was elevated to a new level with the opening of Aphrodite Hills in 2002 but the arrival of the new Sir Nick Faldo-designed course at Elea in October 2010 has stratospherically raised the Cypriot bar.

The par four 4th is perhaps the most outrageously bunkered in Europe and this hole, named “Orchard”, tames the famous “anaconda” bunker at Chart Hills. Two irregularly shaped bunkers, which masquerade as gigantic sandy pieces from a jigsaw puzzle, need to be avoided from the tee. If you can find sanctuary on the fairway, you’ll have an approach shot to a bridged green that slopes up at the front and then cants away towards the back.

The green is protected to the left by a smaller (but still vast) jigsaw-shaped bunker with a Muirfield-styled grassy mound in the centre. To the right of the green, there’s a more conventionally shaped trap. We think there’s more sand on this hole than an average desert.