For quiet
Minthis
Paphos · Cyprus
Most Cypriot luxury crowds the coast. Minthis does the opposite. It sits on a hilltop at Tsada, about 550 metres up and a quarter of an hour from Paphos, inside five million square metres of protected land that it barely touches. The idea is restraint: a place that leaves the hill mostly as it found it.
The estate wraps around a restored 12th-century monastery, Stavros tis Minthis, which still stands in the middle of the golf course. Local legend puts a wooden cross here among the wild mint that gave the hill its name. Woods Bagot drew the masterplan, and the buildings read as low horizontals in local stone and timber, angled to catch the light and the cool hillside air rather than to announce themselves. An 18-hole course threads past olive groves and old walnut and fig trees, and nature trails run off into the Natura 2000 scrub beyond. From the suites the view falls away over wooded ridges towards the sea, with the Troodos behind.
Amaracus is the serious kitchen, seasonal Mediterranean cooking built around the estate's own produce, its olive oil and the Xynisteri grapes picked here each autumn. The Clubhouse takes the easier end of the day, the long lunch after a round, and Bar-M carries the evening. The Minthis Spa is the other draw, a calm block with an indoor pool that frames the same hills through a single wall of glass.
Cyprus does big beach resorts well and small design hotels rarely; the quieter exceptions, like Apokryfo up in the Troodos, tend to sit inland. Minthis belongs with them, a place with a real idea: build lightly on a protected hill and keep an old monastery at its centre. It is as much a residential estate as a hotel, with villas and residences for sale beside the suites you can book by the night, and we will not pretend those are the same proposition. Come for the suites, the table and the quiet, and it earns its place here.
One selection at a time, in your inbox. Subscribe →
On a hilltop at Tsada above Paphos, Cyprus, inside a five-million-square-metre Natura 2000 reserve.
Contemporary stone-and-timber suites, villas and residences, to a Woods Bagot masterplan.
Amaracus for seasonal Mediterranean cooking, the Clubhouse, and Bar-M.
The Minthis Spa with an indoor pool, and an 18-hole golf course that circles a restored 12th-century monastery.
Paphos and its UNESCO sites, the Akamas peninsula, and the Troodos mountains.
Free, one to one, on WhatsApp. Tell me your dates and I will point you to the right places.
Plan with me on WhatsApp
