Travel Guide Dekhelia

The British sovereignty base at Dhekelia is a strange product of history. Ceded to the UK at independence in 1960, this 131 km2 area was a bulwark against the Turkish invasion of 1974. Since then, it has been wedged between the sea (south), the Larnaka district (west), the Agia Napa region (east) and the buffer zone (north). Slightly larger than the Akrotiri base (123 km2), it is home to most of the island's British troops. It also includes three enclaves of the Republic of Cyprus: Xylotymbou (3,600 inhabitants), Ormidia (4,100 inhabitants) and the Dhekelia power plant, which disfigures the shoreline. This has not discouraged developers from concreting the coastline. But at the eastern end, the town of Xilofagou (pop. 6,200) is surrounded by an arid plain that stretches right down to the sea with almost no construction. "It's just a chaos of rocks. No land, no gardens, not a tree", wrote Rimbaud. Between 1878 and 1879, the poet ran a stone quarry here, before returning to France with typhoid fever.