October in the Paphos villages: grape harvest, palouzes and the festivals locals wait all year for

Cyprus has been making wine for roughly five thousand years, and in the Paphos hills the harvest is still done the way grandparents remember. Crates of mavro and xynisteri grapes come in from terraced vineyards, and in many villages the must is still pressed and boiled down in wide copper pots over an open fire.

The best place to see it this month is Arminou, a small village in the Diarizos valley about forty minutes from town. On Sunday 11 October, the village holds its fifth Grape and Local Products Festival: grape pressing demonstrations, palouzes and soutzoukos made in front of you, zivania distillation, local honey, wine, cheese and bread, plus music and dancing in the square. Entry is free, children and dogs are welcome, and the drive alone, through the valley past the Arminou dam, is worth the trip.

A week earlier, on Sunday 4 October, the village of Praitori holds its own palouzes celebration. If you have never had it, palouzes is a thick, warm pudding made from fresh grape must, stirred for hours until it sets, then eaten with almonds and cinnamon. It tastes like autumn in Cyprus in a single spoonful, and it only exists for a few weeks a year, because it can only be made while the must is fresh.

If your only reference is a organised food fair, a Cypriot village panigiri will surprise you. There is no entrance gate and no programme to follow. The square fills with tables, somebody's uncle is in charge of the fire, the coffee shop stays open far past its usual hours, and the whole village, from toddlers to great-grandmothers, is out until late.

The food is not catering. It is whatever the village makes: bread from the wood oven, halloumi from the morning's milk, olives cured in someone's courtyard, and whatever is being celebrated that week, whether grapes, palouzes, avocados or carobs. You buy a plate, you sit where there is space, and within ten minutes the people next to you have asked where you are from and poured you something.

This is the part of Paphos life that never appears in a brochure, and it is the part that makes people stay. The villages around the district, Kathikas, Stroumbi, Drouseia, Ineia, Praitori, Arminou, are twenty to forty minutes from the sea, a few degrees cooler, and run on a calendar that has not changed much in a century.

Drive north along the coast past Latchi and the landscape changes. The Polis Chrysochous plain is one of the most fertile pockets of the island: citrus groves, banana plantations near the coast, and in recent years, avocados. The area around Argaka now grows avocados seriously enough to have its own festival.

The second Argaka Avocado Festival takes place on Saturday 10 October, from early evening in the village. Entry is free. Expect stalls with local produce, avocado in forms you have not considered before, music, and that particular atmosphere of a farming village showing off something it is proud of. It is a good excuse for an autumn day trip: swim at Latchi in the afternoon, eat in Argaka in the evening.

The wider area is worth slow exploration at this time of year. The Baths of Aphrodite trail is comfortable again after the summer heat, the tavernas along the Latchi harbour serve the day's catch without the August queue, and the light over Chrysochous bay in the late afternoon is the kind that makes people start talking about moving here.

The Paphos district sits at the heart of one of the oldest wine regions in the world, and October is when the wine villages earn the name. Around Kathikas, Stroumbi and the villages towards Panagia, the harvest is either just finished or still going, the wineries are working at full pace, and several open their doors for tastings of the new season.

Kathikas, twenty minutes from town at six hundred metres up, is the easiest introduction: a handsome stone village with a square full of tavernas, surrounded by vineyards, cool enough in the evening that you want a jacket. Stroumbi and the villages along the Diarizos valley are quieter and even more traditional. This is also the season to drive the wine routes signposted through the region, which link small family wineries you would never find otherwise.

A word on timing: go on a weekend, go hungry, and accept that lunch in a good village taverna in October is a two-hour minimum. Nobody is in a hurry, and after the first meze arrives you will not be either.

The villages do not get all of October. In town, the cultural calendar is having one of its best stretches of the year. The National Ballet of Slovenia performs Don Quixote on the open-air stage by the Medieval Castle, with principal dancers from the Bolshoi in the leading roles. Watching a full classical ballet with the castle walls behind the stage and the sea behind you is one of those Paphos evenings that feels slightly unreal.

On Monday 5 October, the Markideio Theatre hosts Kostas Hatzis and Daniela, two of the most loved voices in Greek music, in a joint concert of songs most of the audience will know by heart. And through the first weekend of the month, the free Lumiere orchestra concerts move through the village squares, Simou on 2 October and Panagia on 3 October, film music and melodies under the open sky, no ticket needed.

The free Meet the Locals walking tours also restart on Thursday 1 October, leaving from the town centre in the morning. If you are new here, it remains the best two-hour introduction to the old town you can get, led by residents rather than professional guides.

None of this needs much organising, but a few habits make it better.

A car helps. Buses reach the bigger villages but not the festival squares, and half the pleasure is the drive itself. Take a light jacket: the villages sit between four and seven hundred metres up, and evenings are noticeably cooler than the coast. Cash is useful at smaller stalls, though most now take cards.

Festival details in Cyprus have a habit of being announced a week before they happen, in Greek, on Facebook. The Visit Pafos events calendar and the local event listing sites are the most reliable English-language sources, and your neighbours, if you live here, are better than both.

And if you are viewing property while you are here, October tells you the truth about a place. You see the village as it is for the people who live in it year-round, not as it performs in August. That is worth more than any brochure.