Küre Dağları National Park protects 37,753 hectares of the Western Black Sea mountains, spread across the Kastamonu and Bartın provinces, and it was declared on 7 July 2000. The Directorate General of Nature Conservation and National Parks runs it from an office in central Bartın.
The park is built around canyons and the high meadows above them. The directorate points visitors to four viewing terraces cut into the canyon rims — the Muratbaşı Burgu Terrace over the Valla Canyon, the glass terrace over the Çatak Canyon, and the terraces over the Loç Valley and the Aydos Canyon — alongside day-use areas, marked walking paths and visitor information centres.
Higher up, the Sorkun and Zoni plateaus, the Karapınar and Armutlu meadows, the Ilıca Waterfall and the Kızılcasu camping ground are the places set aside for resting and for pitching a tent. The park is sized for a good deal of traffic: it states a capacity of 150,000 visitors, 1,500 vehicles and 500 tents.
One caution comes from the directorate itself rather than from a guidebook: parts of the park are hard terrain with wildlife in it, and the directorate states plainly that it accepts no responsibility for what happens to visitors on the way to those points or after they arrive. Plan the harder canyon approaches accordingly, and ask at the park directorate before setting out.
The directorate calls Küre Dağları one of Europe's most distinguished protected areas, a PAN Parks site holding a Platinum Wilderness Certificate, and a genuine refuge where nature sets its own rules. The canyon figures support the claim: the Valla Canyon is more than a thousand metres deep, which puts it among the few of its kind in the world, and the glass viewing terrace over the Çatak Canyon is described as giving the feeling of floating in mid-air. Underground the park is a labyrinth of 77 discovered caves, and the directorate calls the Ilgarini cave the fourth largest in the world, a masterwork geographical and historical at once.
There is a route to be made of all this at either pace. For walking inside a canyon, the three-kilometre Horma Canyon path at Pınarbaşı is worked into the rock — the directorate's phrase is like wooden embroidery — and comes out at the Ilıca waterfall, where the water is cold enough to take the day's tiredness off. For something faster there is a zipline over the forest at Aşağıköy in Bartın, and for a night out the Kızılcasu camping ground at Şenpazar takes tents and caravans. At Ulus there are nature museums, one of taxidermy and one of ethnography, and the directorate suggests turning the way home towards Safranbolu, on the World Heritage list, or towards Amasra on the coast.
The name of the mountains comes from metal rather than from landscape. Kastamonu and the country around it have been an important centre of copper extraction since antiquity, and küre was the old word for the great casting furnaces and hearths in which ore was melted; the mountains took their name from that fire. The directorate also passes on a local story about the Ulukaya waterfall, inside the Bartın part of the park: that its water is really the tears of a lover. In the legend a young man of ancient times named Selamnos fell in love with Hera, the most beautiful of the beautiful, and married her.
- Designated
- 7.07.2000
Entry fee
- Black Sea group 1 · category 1 · Per person
- 75 ₺
Visiting hours
- Visiting hours
- 08:00 - 18:00
When to go
- Climate
- Across Kastamonu as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from -0.9 °C in January to 20.2 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in May (75 mm) and lightest in February (27 mm). Long-term means for 1930-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
