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Limassol comes to life during the 10 days before Lent, when islanders indulge themselves with feasts and fancy-dress parades. Carnival is also celebrated elsewhere on the island, but Limassol’s celebrations are traditionally the liveliest and most entertaining.

Cyprus blossoms under the spring sun and in May the streets of Larnaka and Pafos are draped in blooms during flower festivals. They climax with parades of floats drowned in colourful garlands.

Kourion’s amphitheatre with its magnificent hillside location (see Kourion)makes the perfect venue for this summer festival of drama. Kourion is also used regularly for concerts, often featuring internationally-known Greek artists, such as Nana Mouskouri, Vicky Leandros and Demis Roussos.

Larnaka takes its place in the limelight when musicians, dancers and actors – many of them from Greece, Balkan and eastern European countries and the former Soviet Union – make the pilgrimage to what has become one of the island’s leading cultural events.

Dancers and musicians revive the all-but-vanished traditions of Cyprus’s villages during this event, which aims to keep the spark of the island’s culture alive. The week offers a glimpse of village life as it was before tourism, television and mobile phones came to places such as Kilani, Omodos, Pera Pedi, Troodos and Mandria

Wine flows freely and there is dancing in the streets as the mountainous Kourris Valley’s vineyard villages – Alassa, Agios Georgios, Doros, Lania, Monagri and Silikou – celebrate the start of the grape harvest. Visitors are welcome to join in, eat, drink and be merry.

The works of ancient playwrights such as Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes leap back to life in Pafos’s ancient odeon during this internationally renowned cultural event. It attracts performers and directors from Cyprus, Greece and further afield.

This is the perfect time to sample Cyprus’s dozens of wines in depth, at length and, best of all, for free. Limassol’s wine-makers celebrate by sponsoring 10 days of wine tastings, held in the city’s attractive municipal gardens. The whole event is accompanied with outdoor live music and dancing in the evenings.

A month after the Greek drama festival, the area in front of Pafos castle comes alive again as the setting for three days of opera, performed by an esteemed international cast. This popular autumn event is one of the highlights of the country’s cultural calendar.

Agia Napa’s lively annual festival has become a magnet for many folk dancers and traditional musicians, especially those from other Mediterranean countries and from Eastern Europe. The event also brings theatre groups, opera companies and international singers to the resort for a particularly dazzling weekend of performances in the island’s busiest resort.