I wanted a golf holiday. My family wanted something else. Aphrodite Hills delivered both

There is always a slight tension when you start planning a family holiday around golf.

You might be dreaming of early tee times, immaculate fairways and squeezing in another 18 holes before dinner; the rest of the family may have rather different ideas.

So when my wife and I travelled to Aphrodite Hills, in Cyprus, this summer with our two boys, the big question wasn’t whether the golf would be good; it was whether we could combine plenty of golf with the sort of holiday all four of us would remember for all the other reasons too.

The answer, happily, was yes. Aphrodite Hills manages to occupy that sweet spot between golf resort and proper family holiday destination. Golf might be at the heart of the place, but it never feels as though everything else is an afterthought.

Our base was a suite with its own private pool – one of those luxuries that immediately changes the rhythm of a family holiday. We could come back after golf or a day out, open the doors and jump straight in.

For the boys, obviously, this was a major selling point. For my wife and me, having our own space to relax at the end of the day wasn’t exactly a hardship either. We could check in on work between endless games of Marco Polo without fear of disturbing others.

Golf, though, was inevitably a huge part of our week. And Aphrodite Hills is a fascinating course because, when you first look at the terrain, you could make a decent argument that this is a terrible place to try to build one.

The land is dramatic, rugged and, at times, almost absurdly steep, with huge changes in elevation, valleys cutting through the landscape and mountains rising around you. There are a couple of buggy journeys between holes that are not for the faint-hearted or anyone with vertigo.

At times you feel less like you are travelling between green and tee and more like you have accidentally found yourself on the access road to a ski resort. And yet somehow, out of this extreme landscape, they have created a golf course that is incredibly playable.

That is probably the cleverest thing about it. The setting is spectacular without the golf ever becoming a slog. The holes themselves are generous enough to be enjoyable but still ask proper questions of the better player. We had a real mix of abilities – from a scratch golfer through to relative beginners and the different sets of tees meant everyone could play the same course and get something out of it.

We played several holes in the evening, which was perfect. As the temperature dropped and the shadows stretched across the fairways, the whole landscape changed. The sunsets were extraordinary – the sort that make you stop mid-round, take your phone out and accept that the group behind may have to wait another 30 seconds. We stood on several tees looking across mountains and valleys, taking endless pictures in the setting sun.

Those evening rounds also became some of my favourite moments of the holiday. Playing golf with your children gives the game a slightly different character. The score still matters – certainly to them – but the rounds become part competition, part conversation and part shared adventure, particularly on those hair-raising buggy rides!

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There’s much more to Aphrodite Hills than golf

The boys spent part of the week at the Masters Football Camp, featuring former Manchester United and England defender Wes Brown. The camps run throughout summer and half term and are led by UEFA and FA-qualified coaches alongside rotating football legends (other ex-players included Emile Heskey, Jermaine Pennant and Louis Saha).

If you are attempting to sell a golf holiday to football-obsessed children, having a Premier and Champions League winner involved is a persuasive piece of negotiation. They loved it. And it meant there was enough going on for the holiday to work for everyone rather than the entire family timetable revolving around my next tee time. I also found time on several mornings to go running.

I always pack my running shoes when I travel, although they occasionally come home having enjoyed more of a holiday than I have. Cyprus was different. Around Aphrodite Hills there are some superb coastal routes, and running early in the day, before the heat really arrived, became one of the unexpected highlights of the trip.

Running on holiday is also an excellent way of creating the illusion that whatever you eat that evening doesn’t count. That proved useful because, as a family, we made a determined effort to work our way around the different restaurants at the resort. One of the pleasures of staying somewhere for several days is being able to vary things every evening rather than finding one reliable option and sticking to it.

Dinner became an important part of the day. After golf, football, running, swimming or simply time in the sun, we could all sit down together and decide which restaurant was next on the list. The Mexican was a favourite, as was the Greek Cypriot taverna, Pithari, and the brand new Asian fusion restaurant, Nusan.

The biggest change of scenery came with our trip to Latchi, on the north-west coast of Cyprus, where the four of us took a boat out for the day. Self-skippered, it was an afternoon that will live long in the memory. We headed out to the Blue Lagoon, swam together, dived from the boat, and almost lost our eldest in a high-speed rubber-ring calamity!

Perhaps that is what struck me most about the whole trip. There are plenty of excellent golf resorts where the equation is straightforward: go there to play golf. Aphrodite Hills offers something broader. The course is dramatic enough to be a destination in its own right. The terrain, the views, the slightly hair-raising buggy rides and those evening sunsets make it unlike almost anywhere else I have played.

But I could also enjoy plenty of golf without the holiday ever feeling as though it was built entirely around me playing it. The boys had football and swimming, we could all disappear for a day on a boat, my wife and I could enjoy the restaurants and the resort, and we had that private pool to come back to whenever we wanted.

The dream family golf holiday isn’t necessarily one where you play 36 holes every day. It is one where everybody goes home feeling they have had their own version of a great trip.

That, ultimately, is probably Aphrodite Hills’ greatest strength.

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