Cyprus owes its capacity as an inhabitable island to Troodos. The mountain overtakes about ⅔ of its area. If it were not for the mountain, it would be a hostile place where humans would not be able to survive.
It creates a favorable climate for rain with its volume and its height that reach 1960 metres, and this is why Cyprus is green from corner to corner.
Rainfall and snow cover the peaks of Troodos quite often, they replenish the underground aquifers of the whole of Cyprus, and overflow quite a few dams that exist in rivers that incise their banks. The mountain has a unique, worldwide “book” about the creation of its earth and its rocks.
Its emergence from the primal bed of today’s Mediterranean, brought out rocks that to be studied in any other case by scientists, they would have to descend to the seabed and this would not be enough since they would have to dig in 2000 metres deep. It also brought up great amounts of copper (copper got its name from “Cyprus”). Great amounts of gold, silver, iron pyrites, asbestos and other metals were also discovered. All of this was the reason why Cyprus and its residents, ever since antiquity until today, have not experienced real freedom.
Back in the ancient times we find a mountain called “Adonis” that in ancient Cypriot is pronounced as “Ados”. As such, we found the “mount Ados” being paraphrased over the years and being renamed to Troodos.
In the Troodos forests we can find a Cypriot animal that is under the protection of the government, living freely and wandering around, an indigenous animal called Agrino. Even though a few years ago it was in danger of becoming extinct, the Cypriot government protected it by law and today we have a population of 3000 animals. When its population increases more than the limits stated by the government, hunters are given special permission to reduce the population until its controlled limit.
Even though they cause huge damages to plants and vines that neighbour with the forests that host them, the residents of the area do not hunt them, on the contrary, they protect them from indifferent people. Arrest for Agrino hunt or owning an Agrino or a part of it without a transcripted permission from the government, gives you a fine of 50000 (fifty thousand) euros.
Troodos and the villages that are situated on its slopes, are the main providers of the island as far as it concerns fruit, even though most of the time, they are destroyed by the hail fall that are the main characteristic of some regions of the mountain. The fruits that are produced, due to the consistence of its rocks, are the sweetest from those imported not only from Europe but from the whole World, and this is why Cypriots and visitors of the island prefer Cypriot fruit.
The Troodos mountains spreads on to 4 districts. Nicosia, Limassol and Larnaca included. The villages that are found on the mountains belong to the district that is closer geographically. There is a ‘village’ that does not belong to any district and it is the “Troodos peak” that legally is a village, but in terms of power, belongs to the government since it is characterised as “forest land”/
In order to categorise the article, we will place Troodos under the district to which it belongs geographically, that is Limassol. This is the reason why the people from Limassol say “you can bathe on the beach of Limassol and in 40 minutes you can ski in the snow of Troodos”.
