What You Actually Pass on the Way to the Blue Lagoon

Most Blue Lagoon boat cruises mention these places in passing, if at all — a name over the speaker, gone before you’ve spotted it from the deck. Here’s what you’re actually looking at.

St. George’s Church and St. George’s Island

The first landmark most boats pass leaving Latchi harbor is a small whitewashed church perched above the coastline, with a scatter of rock just offshore that locals call St. George’s Island. The church itself dates to the 14th century — modest by Cyprus’s standards, but old enough to have outlasted most of what was built around it. The island isn’t much more than an outcrop, but it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d miss if nobody told you it was there, and exactly the kind of thing that photographs better than it sounds on paper.

Plaji (Blaji) Bay’s Theatre Nobody Built

Further along the coast, the boat passes Plaji Bay, also written Blaji Bay depending on the source — once the main working port of the Latchi area, long before Latchi harbor took over that role. What draws the eye here is a natural, semi-circular rock formation that looks, from the water, remarkably like an amphitheater. It wasn’t built; the sea carved it. But it’s easy to see why generations of sailors treated it as one, and why it still gets called the “ancient theatre” by locals despite having no architect at all. The bay is also known for its unusually deep blue water, which frames the whole scene as dramatically as the rock itself.

Manolis Sea Caves

Past Plaji Bay, the cliffs give way to the Manolis Sea Caves — a run of hollows and arches cut into the rock by centuries of wave action. This stretch of coastline is one of the most photographed parts of the whole cruise, and for good reason: the caves shift constantly with the light, dark and cool inside even in August, with the sea moving in and out through openings too narrow to swim through but striking enough to make you want to try.

Fontana Amorosa: The Fountain That Makes You Fall in Love

This is the one almost nobody explains properly, and it’s the best story on the whole route. Fontana Amorosa — literally “fountain of love” — is a small freshwater spring near a wild, secluded cove further along the Akamas coast, tied to Aphrodite by a legend that predates most of what gets repeated about her elsewhere on the island. According to local tradition, anyone who drinks from the spring falls in love again, with whoever they see next.

There’s a second layer to the story that rarely makes it into the boat commentary: locals also speak of a second spring nearby, sometimes called the Spring of Oblivion, said to make anyone who drinks from it forget their current lover entirely. Two springs, a few meters apart, one for love and one for forgetting — nobody agrees on exactly where the second one is, which is part of the appeal. The cove itself spent time as a pirate base in the 16th century, sheltering galleons that used the isolation for exactly what isolation is good for.

Why Most Cruises Don’t Tell You This

Some of this is simply time — a boat cruise has one destination and a schedule to keep, and Fontana Amorosa’s two-spring legend doesn’t fit neatly into a two-minute announcement over the speaker. Some of it is that a few of these cruises run self-guided, with no one on board whose job it is to explain any of it at all. Either way, the result is the same: most people who’ve done this exact route could tell you they saw “some caves and an island,” and nothing more.

We’d rather you knew what you were looking at.

You can see all of this for yourself on our Blue Lagoon Guided Tour or our Blue Lagoon Transfer — either way, now with a bit more to look for along the route.