The Northern Aegean Marine National Park is one of Türkiye's first two marine national parks, declared together with the Fethiye-Kaş Marine National Park by a presidential decision published in the Official Gazette on 16 August 2026. It covers 174,214 hectares of sea. According to the Directorate General of Nature Conservation and National Parks, the area had already been marked as a marine protected area on the country's maritime spatial planning map in 2025; national park status made that protection legally binding, and the directorate uses it for inventory, protection and monitoring of marine biodiversity.
The step has a paper trail behind it. Türkiye's maritime spatial planning map was declared on 16 April 2025 and registered with UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission on 12 June 2025; these waters were added to it as a marine protected area on 2 August 2025, and the national park declaration is what fixed their legal protection. The declaration came together with the Fethiye-Kaş Marine National Park, which is far larger at 2,170,603 hectares, so that the two together brought 2.34 million hectares of sea under protection. With them Türkiye's national parks reached 52 and its protected areas 698 in all. The directorate frames the work against a global target of setting aside 30 per cent of each country's land and sea area as protected, and says it is pursuing that within the twelfth development plan and the ministry's strategic plans, declaring areas in the different statuses provided by the national parks law, the terrestrial hunting law and the wetlands regulation — national park, nature park, nature conservation area, natural monument, wildlife development area and wetland.
- Designated
- 16.08.2026
When to go
- Climate
- Across Çanakkale as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 6.4 °C in January to 25.2 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (105 mm) and lightest in August (11 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
