The thing that makes Nissi singular is not the sand and not even the colour of the water, both of which Cyprus has elsewhere. It is the islet, and what people built behind it.

Start with the name. "Nissi" (Νησί) is simply the Greek word for "island." The beach is named after the small, uninhabited rock-and-scrub islet sitting a short distance offshore. What makes it famous is that you do not need a boat to reach it. A sandbar runs out from the beach to the island, and in calm conditions at low water the crossing is only ankle- to knee-deep. People wade across, stand on the islet, and take the photograph that has come to stand in for the whole of Ayia Napa. The islet itself is low and covered in local vegetation, and it shelters the inner bay, which is part of why the water on the beach side stays so shallow and calm.

This is a real geographic feature, not a marketing invention, and it is genuinely old. In 2005, excavations on the island reportedly uncovered fire-lighting equipment dated to roughly 12,000 years ago, pointing to early human use of the spot. So the islet has been a destination, in some sense, for a very long time. What changed in the last forty years is everything around it.

Now the part most guides skip. Before July 1974, Ayia Napa was a small fishing village of around 200 people. Then came the coup and the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus, and the island's tourism economy was upended. The big resort towns of the north — Famagusta, Kyrenia — fell on the wrong side of the line, and the Republic of Cyprus had to build a new tourist coast almost from scratch on the south. Ayia Napa, with beaches like Nissi, was one of the places that growth landed on. Refugees swelled the town, and over the following years hotels went up along a coast that had been mostly fishing boats and scrub.

The transformation into a clubbing town was largely the work of London-born Cypriots. George Melas, a former Ipswich Town footballer, opened Ayia Napa's first nightclub, the Black & White, near Nissi Beach in 1985. A decade later, in 1995, the London-born Kiss FM DJ Nick Power opened the Kool Club. By the late 1990s the town had become the summer-holiday destination for the UK garage scene. Between roughly 1999 and 2003, Ayia Napa was where UK garage went on holiday — DJ Spoony, So Solid Crew and a long list of MCs and DJs played the town, and it became a place where the now-global sounds of garage and grime were pushed forward. Premier League footballers used it as an anonymous playground and brought British urban music with them. From 2002, the BBC Radio 1 Roadshow broadcast live from Nissi.

The beach bar is where the geography and the scene meet. The Nissi Bay Beach Bar sits directly behind this sand and runs a daytime version of the nightlife: DJs, catwalk shows, beach parties and the foam parties that have become the beach's signature daylight event. The foam machine claims to put out up to 250 litres a minute, and the parties run on a fixed weekly schedule through the season. This is the daytime engine of Ayia Napa's party economy, and it happens on the same sand where, twelve hours earlier, a handful of swimmers had the bay to themselves.

So the singular thing about Nissi is the collision. You have a genuinely beautiful, genuinely ancient natural feature — a shallow turquoise bay with a wadeable islet that humans have used for twelve thousand years — and you have, bolted directly onto it, the daytime front of a party town that was effectively invented in the last forty years by Anglo-Cypriot club promoters and the UK garage scene. Most famous beaches are famous for nature or for nightlife. Nissi is famous for both at once, on the same patch of sand, at different hours of the same day. The early-morning version and the mid-afternoon version are almost different places, and which one is "the real Nissi" depends entirely on when you show up and what you came for. That is not a flaw in the beach. It is the most honest thing about it, and it is why the name, the islet and the beach bar are inseparable in any account of why this beach matters.