The Cyprus Wine Festival in Limassol

What the festival is

The festival has run in Limassol since the early 1960s and reached its sixty-fifth edition in 2026. It is organised by the Municipality of Limassol and held in the Municipal Gardens, a sixty-thousand square metre park on the seafront laid out in 1888.

Wineries pour at stands through the evening alongside food, music and dancing. The tone is closer to a town celebration than to a tasting room — outdoors, busy and social rather than studious.

When it happens and how it works

The festival runs for nine consecutive evenings across late September and early October. The dates shift by a few days from year to year, and the Municipality of Limassol publishes each edition's programme — dates, opening hours, ticket prices and the wineries taking part — ahead of the opening night, so check it before planning around a particular evening.

Entry is ticketed and inexpensive, and it is an evening event rather than a daytime one. In 2026 it ran from 26 September to 4 October, sixteen producers poured, every one of them with a page on this site, and the Municipality ran coaches from Nicosia, Larnaca, Paphos and Ayia Napa on five of the evenings, booked in advance by phone.

When it ends, the harvest celebrations move up to the wine villages, which hold grape and palouzes festivals of their own through October. The guide to the village grape festivals covers where and when.

What to taste while you are there

The value of the festival is breadth. Tasting Xynisteri from several producers side by side in one evening teaches you more about the grape than a week of separate visits, because you are comparing directly rather than across days.

Commandaria is usually well represented, and it is worth trying more than one — the differences between producers are wider than newcomers expect. Zivania, the island's pomace spirit, tends to be poured too.

Using it to plan the rest of a trip

Treat the festival as a shortlisting exercise. Note the producers whose wines you liked, then go and see them in the days afterwards, when you can walk the vineyard and talk to whoever made the wine.

Omodos is about an hour's drive up from the gardens and has several wineries inside the village itself — Ktima Gerolemo, Linos Winery and Oenou Yi are all within walking distance of the square, which makes it an easy morning after a festival evening.