Fethiye is a harbour town on the site of ancient Telmessos, set around a round bay under the mountain of Babadağ, and Ölüdeniz is the beach about sixteen kilometres away where most visitors to the area stay. The things to do here divide into three kinds: the sea at Ölüdeniz, with paragliders landing on its sand from Babadağ; walks and gorges such as Butterfly Valley and Saklıkent; and the remains of Lycia, from the rock tombs above the town and the empty houses of Kayaköy to the ancient cities of Tlos, Pınara and Letoon. Below, the sights are grouped by area, and each has its own guide on this site with the visiting details.
Fethiye town: the rock tombs, the museum and Şövalye Island
The Amintas tombs are cut into a sheer cliff in Fethiye itself. Of the three temple-fronted tombs, the best preserved is called locally the King's Tomb and has become the symbol of the town: a fourth-century BC Ionic temple front with two columns carved into the rock, and an inscription on its wall naming Amynthas, son of Hermapias. A stepped path leads up to it, and inside the chamber are three stone funerary couches.
The Fethiye Museum grew out of the rebuilding of the town after the 1957 earthquake, when works found around Fethiye were gathered together; it began in 1962 as an open-air display beside the Telmessos theatre and moved to Kesikkapı in 1987. Its two halls run in date order, from 3000 BC through to the closing Ottoman centuries. The pieces to look for come from Letoon: the trilingual inscription in Lycian, Greek and Aramaic, and the Apollo mosaic, moved here from the temple of Apollo to protect it from the weather. At the mouth of the gulf, Şövalye Island is the only island around with a settlement on it, and its narrow length shelters the harbour; the Knights of Rhodes, who give it its name, held a castle on it in the fifteenth century, and its walls can still be seen.
Ölüdeniz and Babadağ
Ölüdeniz's shore joins three beaches, Belcekız, Ölüdeniz and Kumburnu, and in a 2006 poll by the German newspaper Bild it came top as the most beautiful beach in the world. Belcekız beach, part of Ölüdeniz beach and the cove of Kıdrak now form the Ölüdeniz-Kıdrak nature park. The two halves differ: Belcekız has no facilities at all, while Kıdrak has a cafeteria, a restaurant, shelters, changing cabins and showers. Town buses run from the Köyler Garajı in Fethiye, and only lines 3-41 and 3-42 continue to Kıdrak.
Babadağ is the reason the sky above the beach is full of canopies. Its launch strips have made it what the conservation directorate calls the most popular paragliding area in the country, and pilots come down on Belcekız beach. A cable car starts on the main road of Ölüdeniz at 226 metres and stops at 1,200 metres, where a café terrace looks over the lagoon, then at 1,700 metres, a terrace known for sunsets, and finally at 1,900 metres near the summit. Footpaths lead off from the stations, and from 1,700 metres a chairlift on the same ticket climbs to the 1,800-metre station.
Butterfly Valley and Gemile
Butterfly Valley is a rocky gorge with pine woods at the foot of Babadağ, protected as a first-degree natural site since 1995. The butterflies, tiger butterflies among them, sit so still on the rocks and trunks that they are easy to miss until a noise sends them up in clouds. Two paths go up the valley, one to the waterfalls and one to the village of Faralya; the second is steep enough to need a rope in places, and walkers without experience are advised to stop at the first waterfall.
Gemile Island, once called Aya Nikola, has the ruins of churches dating from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, and the frescoes in the large church have survived well; along the shore, remains that sank in the earthquakes of 240 and 241 lie two metres under water. Opposite it, Gemile Bay has a sandy beach in pine and olive, reached by excursion boat or by a road that runs out of Fethiye by way of Hisarönü and Kayaköy. The bay is six kilometres from Kayaköy, and the route between them is marked as a walking path.
Kayaköy, the abandoned town
Kayaköy, eight kilometres south of Fethiye, is not ancient: the houses climbing its slope were built by Greeks who lived here in the late Ottoman period. When they left in the population exchange of the early republic, the doors, windows and roofs rotted away and the town became the ghost town you see now. Look at how it was built. No house is larger than fifty square metres, each is placed so as not to take another's light or view, and rainwater from the roofs ran into cisterns at the doorways. There are chapels, two large churches, a school and a customs house among them. The place was called Karmylassos in antiquity, though no find earlier than the fourth century BC has been made.
Saklıkent gorge
Saklıkent National Park, declared in 1996, is the canyon of the Esen stream and straddles the boundary of Muğla and Antalya. The directorate lists canyon walking, trekking and rafting among the things to do. The restaurant, car park, toilets and shops stand on land next to the park boundary, and inside the gorge there is only a single kiosk. The main approach is from Fethiye along the road to Korkuteli.
The Lycian cities: Tlos, Pınara, Letoon and Kadyanda
Tlos, at Yakaköy in Seydikemer, is counted by the ministry among the oldest settlements in Lycia, with people living there continuously from the Neolithic until the Iron Age; Hittite texts call it Dalawa. Its acropolis rises over a stadium, baths and a theatre, the best preserved of its buildings, and the ministry calls Tlos the sports city of Lycia. On the climb, among the temple-fronted rock tombs, find the tomb of Bellerophon, named for its relief of the hero on Pegasus fighting the Chimaera.
Pınara, forty kilometres from Fethiye, was founded, an ancient writer says, by elders of Xanthos when that city became crowded; the name means round, and its upper acropolis is indeed round. The steep face of the upper acropolis carries hundreds of rock tombs, the majority cut to look like houses, and the lower acropolis, the easier one to reach, holds the odeon, the agora and a temple. Letoon, near Kumluova and about four kilometres from Xanthos, was the religious centre of Lycia: three temples stand side by side, to Leto, Artemis and Apollo, and the myth is that Leto turned the local people into frogs when they stopped her washing her children at the spring. Kadyanda, 24 kilometres from Fethiye in the hills above the town, has a theatre, a running track, an agora and large cisterns, and a marked circuit of roughly 2.5 kilometres takes you round it.
Walking and the sea
Fethiye is where the Lycian Way begins: a waymarked footpath of 760 kilometres along the Lycian coast to Antalya, researched and marked by Kate Clow in 1999 as Türkiye's first long-distance walking route. Its stony paths suit spring and autumn rather than summer. The Fethiye chamber of commerce also laid out 343 kilometres of easier day walks linked to it, though that network is no longer maintained. At sea, the waters between Fethiye and Kaş became one of Türkiye's first two marine national parks in August 2026.
