October 20th, 2006
Aphrodite Hills Villas
Investing abroad in Holiday villas is a big business. More and more resorts are being built all over the world to attract people to buy their own dream villas, which they can enjoy for a few months and rent out for the rest of the year. The properties are managed by a company who insures a good annual return. It all sounds attractive, safe and profitable. However, it doesn’t always work out. Let’s look at the example of the Aphrodite Hills Resort in Cyprus where I had the misfortune to spend a week this summer..
The Aphrodite Hills Resort is advertised as being an “award-winning 5 star resort” with a stunning golf course, “the best spa in the eastern Mediterranean”, with its own bars & restaurants. It sounds too good to be true - which of course it is - but having been impressed by the photos published on the web, my partner & I decided to rent one of the villas (with its own swimming pool) for a week. Read our story about staying at a villa in the Aphrodite Hills Resort.
The Aphrodite Hills Resort is built into the mountains nearby Aphrodite’s Rock, one of the main tourist attractions of Cyprus. It is rather secluded, about 25km from Paphos and 35km from Limasol, therefore without a car you would not be able to get there and around the place. The resort itself is huge, villa after villa, built onto the steep hills. It has a Village Center with a pub, restaurant, café bar etc - all of which are rather artificial to say the least. The pub is more like a cosmopolitan wine-bar, the restaurant is rather ordinary and themed.
If you were dropped there blind-folded you would not know you were in Cyprus. And this the real trouble with this resort. The whole place is homogenised, unrealistic and perhaps an idealised version of Mediterranean life.
Most villas look identical or extremely similar, lacking individuality, charm or any architectural creative freedom. You drive through “villages” named after characters from Greek mythology and find developments that are united in appearance and also in artificiality. There is nothing Cypriot or Greek about them. They are soulless, lifeless and meaningless. The whole place feels just bleak and empty. Driving around I was wondering - is this really what people want? Is this really the future of architecture and design - mass produced lego-like constructions with no unique characteristics or architectural statements?
The buildings themselves aren’t built terribly well - the villa I was staying in (built only last year) already had damp and settlement issues. The interiors don’t really have a wow-factor -good interior design wasn’t the main issue, obviously budget seems to have been the driving force. The quality of workmanship leaves a lot to be desired should you bother to look at the details.
If you’re interested in investing, you should also know that the advertised sea-view villas don’t really have spectacular views. They certainly can overlook the sea, but the motorway and electric cables rather spoil the outlook. If you want to have a villa facing the golf course, bear in mind that people will be walking past your garden all day - but more importantly, early morning course maintenance work (noisy mowing etc) makes for a rude awakening at 6am.
The bottom line is that at Aphrodite Villas you do not feel you are in Cyprus - you could be anywhere in the world that has lots of sunshine. Unfortunately the phenomenon is not unique to this resort. It seems that these kind of developments are popping up everywhere around the world - the MacDonaldisation of design and construction. I would certainly not wish to invest money in something so charmless.