Newsroom
Limassol’s Carnival may have wrapped up Sunday evening with music, confetti and packed streets, but for the city’s cleaning crews, the real race began after the last float rolled away.
By dawn on Clean Monday, about 50 tons of waste had been cleared from the city center following the massive parade. According to Limassol Municipality, crews collected roughly 35 tons of paper waste, mostly confetti and parade leftovers, along with 15 tons of mixed garbage.
The parade ended around 6 p.m., but the cleanup operation was already in motion. Archbishop Makarios III Avenue reopened to traffic just three hours later, at 9 p.m., and by about 4 a.m. Monday, the wider city center had been fully restored.
If you drove through at sunrise, you might never have guessed tens of thousands had flooded the streets just hours earlier.
Mayor Yiannis Armeftis said the smooth turnaround wasn’t luck.
“The success was not accidental,” he said, crediting what he described as political will, clear decisions, and investment in upgraded equipment for the municipality’s cleaning service.
The city recently added five new modern sweepers to its fleet, a move the mayor said significantly boosted operational capacity. In total, Sunday night’s effort involved 50 workers, including 40 equipped with cleaning blowers, along with supervisors and foremen coordinating the operation.
On the mechanical side, the lineup was just as intense: 14 sweepers, two dustpan vehicles, four diggers, a loader, a large vacuum truck with two operators, four heavy trucks, and a semi-truck.
In other words, it was a small army.
Data from the Pentakomos Waste Management facility confirmed the scale of the task, 35 tons of recyclable paper waste and 15 tons of mixed waste hauled away in just a few hours.
Carnival in Limassol is known for going big. This year, it seems the cleanup did too.
By the time residents woke up to mark Clean Monday, the party was over, and the city was ready for a fresh start.
