The Golden Sands Hotel: Varosha, Famagusta, Cyprus
Architects: Garnett, Cloughley, Blakemore, and Philippou Brothers.
The Golden Sands Hotel Complex consisted of:
- An Entertainment Centre for residents and non-residents.
- 4 Restaurants.
- 2 Coffee Shops.
- 3 Swimming Pools
- 4 Tennis Courts.
- Mini – Golf.
- Watersports- such as motorboats, pedaloes & waterskiing.
- A Piazza for local entertainment.
- Landscaped Areas.
- A Bank of Cyprus Branch.
Varosha is a city in the Republic of Northern Cyprus. Prior to 1974, it was Famagusta’s contemporary tourism district. Varosha was Cyprus’ most popular tourist resort in the 1970s. Many new high-rise buildings and hotels have been built to accommodate the growing number of tourists.
This essay will look at the construction of hotels and recreational landscapes in Varosha in the 1960s and how they attempted to reinvent the cultural character of the entire island. Using the Golden Sands Hotel and its Architect Patrick Garnett and his collaborators as an example, this research demonstrates how, in addition to promoting the iconographies of contemporary architecture, more particularly hotel architecture and its environmental effect. This history of the contentious landscape of Golden Sands Hotel and Varosha sheds important light on the architectural history and design practices of twentieth-century modern architecture.
The Golden Sands hotel, with a capacity of 1,600 beds, was erected principally on a vast piece of state-owned property near the southern end of the Varosha shore. The sponsor was the state government, and the active participation of the country’s president, Archbishop Makarios III, throughout the whole building process was confirmation of the association with the government’s modernization agenda.
Garnett’s attitude to the Golden Sands was distinct from that of his forefathers Unlike the Teachers Training College, his hotel arose from a different set of realities: on the one hand, the optimism associated with the Republic’s birth in 1960. Operating under these ambiguous conditions, Garnett felt the current scenario too volatile to pursue one of the operational interpretations of the island’s history or environment that he had initially planned to investigate. As a result, he limited his allusions to a local character to two moves: a hint of village scale, via the design of a section of low-rise bungalows, a strategy that Garnett and the management company Trust House Forte had previously practiced in the holiday village in Sardinia; and the repeated use of the palm tree, which appears in most published photographs of the hotel, to emphasize the exotic setting.
Cyprus had palms in its townscapes and rural landscapes, but Garnett made them a feature of his environment, and hence part of the island’s trademark. Beyond that, as his works show, Garnett clung to abstract allusions to beach hotel types and peaceful geographical compositions of tall, vertical structures on a strip of sand. He identified these formal choices with Miami. These sorts of structures contributed to form local cosmopolitan identities wherever they appeared, and they highlight the importance of tourism in the global transmission of architectural iconographies of modernity.
For what it is worth, Garnett’s carefully selective allusions to the local cannot be explained merely in terms of a simple modernist tension between the universal and the provincial; or in terms of the tourism industry’s preference for the exotic. The architect’s vague allusions to local history and identity were also strongly linked to the reality of Cyprus’s war and the intense desire to avoid them. These situations, contrary to what he had planned, would not provide clear, legible design inspiration for travelers seeking an escape from their own reality.
Golden Sands, which has not been touched since 1974, was visited by a press group, who discovered that the Golden Sands hotel was still intact and fully furnished, which justifies the tourist facilities, which came into existence in a record time between 1965 and 1974, forming an extensive linear area that took advantage of free access to sea, sun, and sand to create Varosha’s characteristic modernist landscape. They were a diverse experimentation with hotel typologies such as Golden Sands hotel and apartment buildings, landscape and interior design: beach pavilions, hotel lobbies, bars, restaurants, balconies and gardens, with the belief that they would give birth to a leisure culture that visitors and locals could share, with the economic and other benefits of tourism being disseminated to the entire society. I hope that one day this magnificent design will be reopened to the public so that everyone may enjoy its lovely landscape.
