Atalante Trail

The bus stops at the trail. The trailhead is Troodos Square itself, and the distance between the stop and the first step of the loop is 70 m — about a minute. It is also a loop that comes back to the same square, so there is no second walk waiting at the end: you finish where the bus is standing. That is the whole of the difficulty here, because the timetable is thin. From Limassol there is exactly one bus each way, every day of the week: the 64 from Lemesos reaches the Square at 10:40, and the same line leaves it again at 15:30. That is four hours and fifty minutes on the hill for a 13.2 km walk — enough only if you keep moving, and nothing like a day you can linger through. Kakopetria is the better approach on a weekday: the 87 comes in at 09:44, 12:49 and 15:24 and goes out at 09:50, 12:50 and 15:50, so the morning pair gives you six hours and six minutes. From Nicosia the 408 runs from Makario Stadium on Saturday and Sunday only, in at 09:22, 12:18 (12:23 on Sunday) and 15:23 (15:19 on Sunday), back to the Stadium at 10:00, 13:00 and 16:00 — six hours and thirty-eight minutes from the first pair. The 64A from Saittas by way of Platres touches the Square at 12:40 on Saturday and 12:10 on Sunday, and leaves again at 14:15 and 13:45. However you arrive, the last useful bus out is the 15:30 to Limassol, the 15:50 to Kakopetria on a weekday, or the 16:00 to Nicosia at the weekend. Miss it and there is no following bus — you are phoning someone to come up the mountain for you.

Shade is not the question on this trail. Forty-nine of the fifty canopy samples along the loop fall inside mapped woodland, and ninety-two per cent of the way runs as mountain track under black pine, so the sun is filtered out from the first minute to the last. Altitude and the timetable decide the month instead. The loop sits between 1,702 m and 1,808 m, and of its 508 recorded samples only seven sit on a steep gradient — 249 flat, 191 easy, 61 moderate — so this is a long, gentle undulation rather than a climb, and that is what makes the warm months possible. I walked it in June, and the cold air at 1,700 metres was the point of it: the coast was already baking while up here the forest kept the heat off the path and the quiet felt deliberate. Midsummer works on exactly that condition, with one catch — the single Limassol pair, 10:40 in and 15:30 out, puts you on the hill in the warmest part of the day and takes you off it before the light softens, so in July and August the Kakopetria or Nicosia approach is the better plan. April and May are the prettiest of it: green in the clearings, ground dry enough to hold a pace, the light long. October and November are just as good and emptier, and the year's first cold settles in without yet closing anything. Winter is the honest no. December to February the high ground belongs to frost and mud, snow reaches the Square often enough to break a plan, and a wet path at 1,750 m with the dark arriving before five is not what this loop is for. Whatever month you come in, leave time for the old Hadjipavlou mine workings the trail passes — the Geopark boards explain them, and that stretch of broken rock and shade is worth the minutes it costs.