Adrasan

Adrasan is a small coastal neighbourhood in the Kumluca district of Antalya Province, known until 1995 by its older name, Çavuşköy, before growing tourism gave it town status under the name Adrasan — itself derived from the ancient Greek "Erdassa". The 2022 census counted just 2,602 permanent residents, though that figure has climbed steadily for decades, from about 1,500 in 1980 to over 2,500 by the 2000 census, tracking Turkey's wider coastal tourism boom. The population swells considerably each summer as visitors fill its pensions, small hotels and beachfront restaurants along a 2.5-kilometre stretch of sand-and-shingle shoreline.

A Village Between the Mountains and the Sea

Adrasan lost its status as a separate town in the 2013 reorganisation of Turkish local government and is now formally a neighbourhood of Kumluca, but on the ground little has changed: a single valley opening onto a bay, hemmed in by forested ridges, reached either by a winding road off the coastal highway or by sea. Behind the village rises Musa Dağı, whose highest point, Eren Tepe, reaches 997 metres. The bay is sheltered and the water unusually clear — visibility of up to 25 metres has been recorded — which is why it draws divers and snorkellers as well as swimmers.

The whole coastline here sits inside Beydağları Coastal National Park, also known as Olympos Beydağları, established by government decree on 16 March 1972 and covering roughly 34,425 hectares from Sarısu, south-west of Antalya, down to Cape Gelidonya. The park climbs from sea level to 2,365 metres at Tahtalı Dağı, the mountain the ancients called Lycian Olympus, and more than 865 plant species have been recorded within it, 25 of them endemic. A wildfire in 2015 burned around 125 hectares of pine forest near the village, but the beaches and walking routes have since recovered. Antalya's airport lies about 107 kilometres away by road, far enough that Adrasan never developed the way the resorts closer to the city did.

Walking the Lycian Way

Adrasan is one of the better-known waypoints on the Lycian Way, the long-distance path that runs roughly 760 kilometres from Hisarönü near Fethiye to Geyikbayırı, about 20 kilometres from Antalya. The route was conceived by the British researcher Kate Clow and opened in 1999, and it is waymarked in the French GR style, with red-and-white stripes painted on rocks and trees at intervals of about 50 metres. Since 2010 an annual ultramarathon of some 220 to 240 kilometres has been run along parts of it.

Two of the trail's most striking sights lie within a day's walk of the village. North of Adrasan, roughly three kilometres inland from Çıralı, around two dozen vents on a hillside emit burning methane of metamorphic origin — the eternal flames of Mount Chimaera, known in Turkish as Yanartaş, the "flaming rock". Pliny the Elder, citing Ctesias, connected the fires with the Chimera of myth, and in antiquity sailors used them as a navigational landmark. To the south, the path climbs to the lighthouse on Cape Gelidonya, a tower only about nine metres high but set some 227 metres above the sea, making it the highest-sited lighthouse on the Turkish coast. Begun in 1934 and in service from 1936, it has no road access and no mains electricity; a solar system was installed in 2017.

Cape Gelidonya and the Birth of Underwater Archaeology

The cape below that lighthouse, between the Gulf of Antalya and the Bay of Finike, gave its name to one of the most consequential excavations in the history of archaeology. In 1960 a team led by Peter Throckmorton, George F. Bass, Joan du Plat Taylor and Frédéric Dumas worked on a late Bronze Age wreck lying at about 27 metres on an irregular rocky bottom, dating to roughly 1200 BC. Its cargo included copper and tin ingots, scrap copper and a set of merchants' weights, and it was the first ancient shipwreck to be excavated in its entirety on the seabed by archaeologists rather than stripped piecemeal by salvors — the work that effectively founded the discipline of nautical archaeology, decades before the far richer Uluburun wreck was found further west. The five small islets off the headland were known in antiquity as the Chelidoniai, the Swallow Islands, and are still called Beşadalar in Turkish.

Olympos, Suluada and the Bays Nearby

About 25 kilometres up the coast from Adrasan lie the ruins of Olympos, a city important enough to hold three votes in the federal assembly of the Lycian League. In the first century BC it fell under the control of the pirate chief Zeniketes, and when Roman forces under Publius Servilius Isauricus closed in he burned himself and his family rather than be taken alive; Olympos was expelled from the League and readmitted only in the following century. It became a Byzantine bishopric in the fifth century before being abandoned during the era of the Arab raids, and its overgrown ruins now sit among the trees behind the beach.

Offshore, some seven to eight kilometres from Adrasan beach, the uninhabited island of Suluada stretches about 1,200 metres from end to end. There is no road and no development of any kind: it is a protected site where camping and accommodation are prohibited, and it can only be reached by boat, which is why day boats leave the bay for it every morning in season. Between the island, the coves running toward Cape Gelidonya and the ruins up the coast, Adrasan remains a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Turkey, who anchor off the beach before continuing toward the smaller bays nearby.