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FARAH SHAMMAS
St Raphael Marina, the launch of a boating vision
The managing director of Limassol’s St Raphael Resort pictured with her father, Nizam. She looks back to the days when her grandfather struggled through red tape for five years to build his dream marina. But, she says, it was all worthwhile.
By Annette Chrysostomou
That the first and for many years the largest commercial marina in the Eastern Mediterranean was built near Limassol is in part the result of two wars: the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the Lebanese civil war.
The St Raphael marina which opened more than 30 years ago was the vision of Lebanese entrepreneur Shukri Hanna Shammas. He was one of thousands of other Lebanese who came to Cyprus in the late 1970s and 1980s to escape the bewilderingly complex civil war which shattered his country between 1975 and 1990.
His adopted country was itself still traumatised by the 1974 Turkish invasion, its economy in tatters. Cyprus was desperately looking for ways to build up its tourism sector after the loss of Famagusta’s famed beaches and hotels.
“He fell in love with Cyprus,” said his granddaughter Farah Shammas, now the managing director of the St Raphael resort.
Shammas wanted to build a marina, offering berths and facilities for yacht and boat owners, which would help launch a thriving boating culture in Cyprus.This marina would be part of a resort, hotel complex which together would promote what was then a new type of tourism for Cyprus.
“He came to Cyprus [to live] in 1978 and started lengthy discussions with the Cyprus government, and in 1981 an agreement was signed,” Farah Shammas explained.
Although getting a licence to purchase the land for the St Raphael marina was relatively straightforward, the lack of legislation in Cyprus regulating such a project meant it took around five years to get the necessary contracts drawn up.
While Shammas won the bureaucratic, red tape-laden battle with the government over the marina, the self-made entrepreneur lost the war when it came to some of the many other ideas he had for promoting tourism in Cyprus. One of them was the introduction of a helicopter service between the cities and Troodos in an attempt to promote tourism in this stunning but neglected part of the island.
At the time, his granddaughter recounts, Cyprus Airways strongly lobbied against it. “I don’t know why,” she joked, “they didn’t fly to Troodos!” And as inevitably the taxi drivers were not too keen on the idea and resisted, the project never got off the ground.
The Saint Raphael marina opened in August 1986 and the five-star hotel on June 29 1987. While Shukri Shammas provided the vision, it was his son Nizam Shammas, a civil engineer, who realised and executed it.
According to Farah Shammas, the family invested the money, all in all CY £35 million (nearly €60 million) themselves and didn’t expect a profit in the first years.
“Now we know better. It never became profitable,” she laughed, adding that for the Shammas family the main aim was to promote Cyprus as a boating destination.
The financial challenges were indeed daunting. In those early years the government controlled the fees for the berths and introduced a luxury tax for yacht owners. This didn’t leave much room for the investors to make money from the venture.
With the economic effects of the invasion still in place, not many Cypriots could afford to buy speedboats and yachts. At the beginning their main clients were foreigners working for offshore companies in Cyprus and wealthy Lebanese who, like the Shammas family, had made Cyprus their home.
Saint Raphael marina’s relatively small size has promoted a strong sense of community,camaraderie and customer loyalty over the years, but it has had an added impact of profitability. Experts say that it takes at least 400 t0 500 berths for a marina to make money, but Saint Raphael has only 237.
Studies which were carried out at the time found the limiting factor was the depth of the southern breakwater. Extending it to a depth of more than 6.5 metres was prohibitively expensive, and this was the only way it could have been made bigger. Later studies with a view to expansion also proved that such a development was too costly.
So how does Farah Shammas see the future of her grandfather’s legacy? Is it threatened by the new, much bigger Limassol marina just along the coast which opened in 2013? Not really, she says. Though some clients did leave, there was a waiting list and thus it simply allowed others to take their place.
The two destinations are also not in direct competition. Saint Raphael marina has only two restaurants, and ample parking is always available. “It is homely and has no commercial side, and run by family and staff who have been around for more than 30 years,” she said.
This may be so, but what about the other marinas planned for Ayia Napa, Paralimni, Paphos and Larnaca?
“Cyprus may become completely flooded with berths,” she commented, “but it will probably make Cyprus a destination for boating with people moving around between marinas.”
And that is exactly what her visionary grandfather wanted all those years ago.
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