Category: Ayia Napa

Cyprus National Internet Portal for Open Data

It is via this Cyprus Mail article that I’ve learned that not only Cyprus has an official Open Data portal, but that it’s also the best in Europe:

Cyprus is one of the top five European Union countries in the field of Open Data for 2018, while the new National Open Data Portal data.gov.cy scored highest among 31 open data portals in Europe, a special honour and recognition for the Open University of Cyprus (OUC) that developed and implemented the National Open Data Portal in collaboration with the public administration and personnel department of the finance ministry.

So far I’ve only had a quick look around, and I have to say that it’s quite impressive!  Even though most of it is in Greek, Google Chrome translation handles it nicely.  Here are a couple of interesting bits to get you started:

And there is so much more … Well done, Open University of Cyprus!

Ayia Napa is on fire … not literally of course


Cyprus Mail reports that Ayia Napa enjoys the best tourism year in the last 10 years.

A MASSIVE increase in tourism from Russia, more bookings from Britain and instability in the Middle East have helped kick-start a tourism boom in Ayia Napa which is being lauded as the best year in a decade.

It was announced yesterday that hotel occupancy in Ayia Napa and Protaras reached full capacity during the summer period with the added bonus of the holiday season stretching till November

.I’ve been to Ayia Napa and Protaras a couple of weeks ago and it was obvious that the situation with tourists there is very different from Limassol.  Crowds and crowds of people on the streets, and everywhere.  In Protaras it was even difficult to walk through in the evening – so many people around.  When we drove back to Limassol, it was empty like a deserted island.  Someone in the car suggested that that might be because we came back later in the evening, but I disagreed.  It only takes about an hour and a half to drive from Protaras to Limassol. And there was no way all those people in Protaras could have disappeared from the streets in that time frame.  Now, the newspaper confirms that the situation over there is indeed different.