E4

The E4 in Cyprus is the island's segment of the European Long Distance Path E4, a continental hiking route that begins in the western Mediterranean and reaches its southernmost end here. It is not a day walk. The Cyprus section runs roughly 539 km between Larnaka and Pafos international airports, traverses the Troodos mountain range and the Akamas peninsula, and climbs from sea level to close to 2,000 m before descending again. It is intended for thru-hikers or section-hikers who want to walk the island end to end over many days.

The Cyprus section was inaugurated in 2005 and is officially divided into a long sequence of stages, each linking villages, forest tracks, and existing nature trails. Because the route stitches together so many different landscapes — coastline, agricultural country, pine forest, mountain ridge — it works less as a single trail and more as a backbone that ties Cyprus's hiking network together. Many shorter trails on this site are, in effect, fragments of it.

For walkers, the appeal is scale and variety: arriving at Troodos on foot from one coast and continuing down to the other is a very different experience from driving between trailheads. It also connects the island to the wider European hiking network, since the same waymark continues from Greece across the continent.