page_title: Geography of Cyprus
section_title: Terrain
hierarchical_section_title: Geography of Cyprus / Terrain
caption_attribution_description: English: Cyprus, photographed by Chris Hadfield from the International Space Station
context_page_description: Cyprus is an island in the Eastern Basin of the Mediterranean Sea. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean, after the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia, and the 80th largest island in the world by area. It is located south of the Anatolian peninsula, so it may be included in Western Asia or the Middle East: Cyprus is close to Southern Europe, and Northern Africa, and has had lengthy periods of mainly Greek and intermittent Anatolian, Levantine, Byzantine, Turkish, and Western European influence.
  The island is dominated by two mountain ranges, the Troodos Mountains and the Kyrenia Mountains or Pentadaktylos, and the central plain, the Mesaoria, between them. The Troodos Mountains cover most of the southern and western portions of the island and account for roughly half its area. The narrow Kyrenia Range extends along the northern coastline. It is not as high as the Troodos Mountains, and it occupies substantially less area. The two mountain ranges run generally parallel to the Taurus Mountains on the Turkish mainland, the outlines of which are visible from northern Cyprus. Coastal lowlands, varying in width, surround the island.
context_section_description: The rugged Troodos Mountains, whose principal range stretches from Pomos Point in the northwest almost to Larnaca Bay on the east, are the single most conspicuous feature of the landscape. Intensive uplifting and folding in the formative period left the area highly fragmented, so that subordinate ranges and spurs veer off at many angles, their slopes incised by steep-sided valleys. In the southwest, the mountains descend in a series of stepped foothills to the coastal plain.
  While the Troodos Mountains are a massif formed of molten igneous rock, the Kyrenia Range is a narrow limestone ridge that rises suddenly from the plains. Its easternmost extension becomes a series of foothills on the Karpass Peninsula. That peninsula points toward Asia Minor, to which Cyprus belongs geologically.
  Even the highest peaks of the Kyrenia Range are hardly more than half the height of the great dome of the Troodos massif, Mount Olympus (1,952 m or 6,404 ft), but their seemingly inaccessible, jagged slopes make them considerably more spectacular. British writer Lawrence Durrell, in Bitter Lemons, wrote of the Troodos as "an unlovely jumble of crags and heavyweight rocks" and of the Kyrenia Range as belonging to "the world of Gothic Europe, its lofty crags studded with crusader castles."
  Rich copper deposits were discovered in antiquity on the slopes of the Troodos. The massive sulfide deposits formed as a part of an ophiolite complex at a spreading center under the Mediterranean Sea which was tectonically uplifted during the Pleistocene and emplaced in its current location.
caption: This image, photographed from the International Space Station in 2013, shows the three distinct geologic regions of the island. In the central and western part of the island is the Troodos Massif, a mountain range whose surface layer is mostly basaltic lava rock, and whose maximum elevation is 1,952 m (6,404 ft). Running in a thin arc along the northeast margin of the island is Cyprus's second mountain range, a limestone formation called the Kyrenia Range. The space between these ranges is home to the capital Nicosia, visible as a grayish-brown patch near the image's center.
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