In Antalya you can walk the walled old town of Kaleiçi down to its harbour, see the Roman theatres at Aspendos and Side and the ruins of Perge, climb to Termessos in the mountains, watch the Düden stream drop into the sea, walk into Köprülü Canyon, take a boat over the sunken remains at Kekova, and climb Alanya's castle. Below, the province's sights are grouped by theme with their districts, so you can see what fits into one day; each has its own guide on this site with the visiting details.
In the city centre: Kaleiçi and Hadrian's Gate
Kaleiçi is the old centre of Antalya, enclosed by walls that several civilisations built over more than two thousand years. Narrow streets of two- and three-storey houses, each with one face to the street and the rest to a garden, run down to the ancient harbour, which now serves as a marina; day boats leave from it along the cliffs. Among the buildings to look for are the Yivli Minare, the Hıdırlık tower, the clock tower and the Karatay medrese.
Hadrian's Gate, which locals call Üçkapılar, the Three Gates, was built into the city wall in the year 130 to honour a visit by the emperor Hadrian. Its three arches and marble columns still stand, with a tower on either side. Inside the old town, the Suna-İnan Kıraç Kaleiçi Museum is a pair of restored buildings: a traditional Antalya house where scenes of nineteenth-century Kaleiçi life, from coffee service to a henna night, are staged with figures, and the church of Aya Yorgi, now hung with Çanakkale ceramics.
Ancient cities to the east: Perge, Aspendos and Side
Perge lies in the Aksu district, 17 kilometres east of the city. Its Hellenistic towers come from the planned city of the third century BC, but most of what you walk through belongs to its Roman golden age: the theatre, the stadium, the city gate, the agora, and the baths and fountains that made water part of the city's decoration.
Aspendos, in Serik, is visited for its Roman theatre, which the ministry calls the best preserved in the whole Mediterranean world. It was built under Marcus Aurelius by the architect Zenon and seats fifteen to twenty thousand people; its later use as a Seljuk caravanserai is credited with keeping it intact. The other thing to see is the aqueduct, an arched bridge about a kilometre long with a pressure tower at each end.
Side, in Manavgat, occupies a peninsula, and its theatre stands where the peninsula narrows: a building that follows a Hellenistic plan but is built in the Roman way, with a frieze of the life of Dionysus along its stage. The temples of Apollo and Athena stand apart from it and are worth the walk. The Side Archaeological Museum occupies the Roman Agora Bath in the middle of the ruins, where inscriptions in Sidetic, the city's own script, are shown together, and much of the collection stands outdoors in the garden.
Into the hills: Termessos and Karain Cave
Termessos stands in a valley of Güllük mountain inside the national park that carries its name, and seeing it means a climb on foot from the car park, past a temple of Hadrian's time and the gymnasium. Alexander besieged the city in 333 BC and its people refused to surrender. The theatre looks out to the gulf of Antalya, the council house stands to roof height, and the cemeteries include the tomb of Alketas, one of Alexander's commanders.
Karain Cave, thirty kilometres north-west of Antalya, is the largest cave in Türkiye in which people have lived. Excavation since 1946 has found unbroken occupation from the Lower Palaeolithic onward, and the oldest human remains known in Anatolia came from here. The finds are shown in the Karain Museum beside the cave.
Düden, Kurşunlu and the canyons of Manavgat
The Düden waterfall at Düdenbaşı, in Kepez, comes out after a long journey underground, which is why it keeps flowing even when the surface is dry. Below it the Düden stream runs on toward the coast and, east of the city, drops over a travertine lip some forty metres high straight into the Mediterranean: the Lower Düden waterfall. The Kurşunlu waterfall, reached off the Antalya–Aksu highway, falls eighteen metres into a two-kilometre canyon with seven small pools linked by lesser falls, inside a nature park of pine woods and walking paths.
Inland in Manavgat, Köprülü Canyon National Park follows the Köprü stream between Bolasan and Beşkonak. The canyon runs fourteen kilometres and is a hundred metres deep, the longest in the country; an old stone bridge across the stream is still in use, and the park holds cedar forests and rock formations. Tazı Canyon, inside the same park and reached through Beşkonak, is known for the view from its rim over walls 300 to 400 metres high.
West along the coast: Phaselis, Olympos and Tahtalı (Kemer and Kumluca)
Phaselis, in Kemer, was founded by Rhodians in 690 BC on a shore under pine forest, and it had three separate harbours. A paved street joins the military harbour to the southern one, with the theatre, three agoras and two baths along the way; the emperor Hadrian visited in 129. Olympos, in Kumluca, was built on both banks of the Olympos stream, and its beach is a nesting ground for loggerhead turtles. The village beside it is known for tree houses and lies on the Lycian Way.
Above the Kemer coast rises Tahtalı Dağı, at 2,365 metres, within Beydağları National Park. The Olimpos Teleferik cable car runs from the shore to the summit, which Kemer Municipality presents as the longest cable car in Europe, and mountain paths lead from the top down to Beycik village and Çukuryayla.
The Lycian coast: Demre, Kekova and Kaş
In Demre, Myra was one of the six leading cities of the Lycian League. Its Roman theatre is one of the few to have survived largely intact, and rock tombs with carved reliefs flank it. Also in Demre, the St. Nicholas Church Memorial Museum is the church built over the grave of Saint Nicholas, bishop of Myra, with paintings of his miracles on its walls and a Roman sarcophagus thought to be his.
Kekova is an area rather than a town: islands and bays full of Lycian remains, with sarcophagi standing in the water and sunken settlements around the island. It is reached by boat. On the shore opposite the island, Simena, today Kaleköy, climbs from the sea to a medieval castle with a theatre cut into the rock for about three hundred people.
In Kaş, ancient Antiphellos lies in and around the town: a theatre with twenty-six rows of seats facing the sea, and on Uzun Çarşı Caddesi a Lycian sarcophagus with lions' heads on its lid that has become the town's symbol. Kaputaş Beach, 18 km west of Kaş, is a beach of white sand and turquoise water reached down a long flight of steps. Patara, also in Kaş, was the capital of the Lycian League and the birthplace of Saint Nicholas; you enter through a Roman triumphal gateway, and beside the site runs a beach eighteen kilometres long where loggerhead turtles come to lay their eggs. Xanthos, at the village of Kınık in Kaş, was the capital of Lycia in antiquity and is on the UNESCO World Heritage List; among its rock tombs and sarcophagi stand the pillar tombs particular to Lycian culture, and the theatre and an Early Christian church are there to see as well.
Alanya: the castle and Dim Cave
Alanya Castle stands on a peninsula some 250 metres above the sea, with walls running 6.5 kilometres. Most of what survives is Seljuk work by Sultan Alaeddin Keykubad I, who took the town in 1220 and 1221; the inner castle at the summit, where his palace stood, is now laid out as a museum. People still live inside the walls, and you can reach the top by road, on foot or by cable car. Dim Cave, eleven kilometres from Alanya, opens 360 metres of its passages to visitors, keeps a steady eighteen degrees through the year, and ends at a small lake.
Beaches and a ski slope
Konyaaltı Beach stretches along the shore on the western side of Antalya, with public beach facilities run by the municipality. Lara Beach, 12 kilometres east of the centre, has very fine sand with pine woods behind it. Up in the Bey Dağları, Saklıkent Ski Centre lies 50 kilometres north-west of the city, about an hour away, and the provincial directorate presents it as one of the few places where one day can take in two seasons. Each place's own page has the visiting details and, where the source gives them, opening hours and fees.
