Four Layers Under the Sunbeds: A History of Fig Tree Bay
Fig Tree Bay reads, at first, like a beach with no history: 500 metres of gold sand, a scrub-covered islet, and a wall of Protaras hotels behind it. But four distinct pasts sit stacked on this small bay, from a Hellenistic grave to a review-site ranking. Dug up in order, they explain how a family beach in the Famagusta district became a name people outside Cyprus recognise.
The name, and what it is not
The bay is named for the fig trees that grow along the coast behind it. That is the whole documented origin: a stretch of shore with fig trees on it. Travel copy has since attached a single "400-year-old" or "800-year-old" tree to the place, planted by Venetians or "eastern invaders," but those claims trace to tourism sites, not to any record, and they contradict each other. The reliable version is the plain one: fig trees, plural, on the coast, giving a bay its name. It is worth holding that line, because the rest of Fig Tree Bay's history is unusually well documented, and it does not need an invented ancient tree to be interesting.
The tomb the raiders missed
The oldest firmly dated layer is a grave. In May 2010, workers cutting a new pedestrian path behind the beach broke into a tomb only a few feet below the surface. It was roughly 2,400 years old, from around 300 BC, the Hellenistic period when the Ptolemies ruled Cyprus. Inside were four sarcophagi with painted floral lids, along with human bones, glass, and pottery.
What made it matter was its condition. Maria Hadjicosti, then director of the Department of Antiquities, said the find's importance was "primarily that it is un-looted, unlike most tombs in the area." In a district where grave-robbers reached almost everything centuries ago, an intact tomb was rare enough to reset expectations, and archaeologists took it as a sign of a larger, still-buried cemetery under the modern resort. Twenty-four centuries before the sunbeds, this was a place people were laid to rest.
1974: the beach's real origin story
The reason Fig Tree Bay is a resort beach at all is a war. Into the early 1970s, the glamour of the Famagusta district was Varosha, a corridor of modernist hotel towers a few kilometres north, sometimes called the Mediterranean's Las Vegas. On 14 August 1974, as Turkish forces advanced on Famagusta in the second phase of the invasion, Varosha was evacuated. Its Greek Cypriot population fled inland to Paralimni and Deryneia, and the district was fenced off. It has stood empty and sealed ever since.
The tourism industry did not vanish; it moved. Over the following decades, the hotels, tour operators, and holidaymakers who could no longer use Varosha relocated down the coast that remained under Republic of Cyprus control, to Ayia Napa and to Protaras. The continuous wall of development behind Fig Tree Bay is that relocation, rebuilt. The municipality that now runs the beach, Paralimni, is the same town that took in Varosha's refugees. The crowded backdrop tourists sometimes complain about is, in effect, a displaced resort strip standing in for a lost one.
2011: the ranking that made the name
The fourth layer is the most recent and the most powerful for how the beach is seen today. In 2011, TripAdvisor's Travellers' Choice awards named Fig Tree Bay the third-best beach in Europe. It was a review aggregate, not an ecological survey, but the effect was concrete: the line became the anchor of Protaras's marketing and pulled package tourism onto a physically small bay.
The ranking has never sat still. By 2013 the same list had Fig Tree Bay down to 13th, and in February 2026 it returned to a European top-19 as the only Cypriot beach on it. The number swings because it measures attention, not the beach, which does not change. That is the honest shape of Fig Tree Bay's modern fame: not a singular natural wonder, but a small, well-run bay that a review site lifted onto the international map and has been rising and falling on ever since.
A footnote in a record sleeve
There is a fifth, slighter trace worth naming because it is real. The English guitarist Peter Frampton released a track called "Fig Tree Bay" on his debut solo album Wind of Change on 26 May 1972, reportedly written after a holiday in Cyprus, a decade before the TripAdvisor era. It is a footnote rather than a landmark, and it does not draw a single visitor, but it means the name was on a record four decades before it was on a ranking.
Stacked together, these layers make Fig Tree Bay legible: a Hellenistic cemetery under the path, a war that moved an industry onto this coast, a ranking that turned a small bay into a brand, and a beach maintained with pumped sand to keep the whole thing looking the part. The sunbeds sit on top of all of it.
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