Guvercin Island Antalya

Guvercin Adasi is a small, uninhabited islet lying off the shore of Finike, on the western side of the district near the village of Boldag. It rises only a few metres above the water, carries no buildings and is reached only by boat, so it functions as an anchorage and a swimming stop rather than a destination in its own right. What draws people is the water around it.

The Island and Its Water

This part of the coast is limestone, not volcanic rock. The Teke peninsula is karst country, and the ledges, overhangs and small underwater caves around the island are the work of limestone weathering and changing sea levels rather than lava. The seabed drops away in steps, which is what makes the site worth a mask: snorkelling, free diving and kayaking are all straightforward here in settled weather, and the visibility is usually good.

Amphora sherds turn up on dive sites all along this coast. Anything of that kind is state property under Turkish law, and it stays where it lies.

The water is usually calm and often windless, and boats normally lie on the north side of the island, which makes it one of the anchorages you'll visit on a private gulet cruise in Turkey working the stretch between Kekova and the Gulf of Antalya. Easterlies and westerlies do get up, though, and when they do the sheltered side changes.

Rod fishing and spearfishing are both prohibited in the waters around the island. Further out, Finike gives its name to Turkey's first offshore marine protected area: the Finike Underwater Mountains, a group of seamounts declared a Special Environmental Protection Area in 2013 and covering over a million hectares of deep water. That designation applies well out to sea rather than to the coastal anchorages, but it is why the district's name appears in marine conservation work.

Finike

Finike sits where the Taurus mountains meet the sea, and its job has not changed much in two and a half thousand years. The ancient town here was Phoinix, and it served as the port of Limyra, the Lycian city a short way inland to the northeast, shipping out the produce of the plain behind it.

Limyra was briefly the seat of Lycian power. In the fourth century BC the dynast Pericles made it his capital while backing the revolt of the satraps against Persian rule, and his mausoleum stands on the hillside above the site with much of its sculptural relief still in place. The theatre below was paid for in the second century AD by Opramoas of Rhodiapolis and seated somewhere around 8,000. East of the city there is a Roman bridge that counts among the earliest known segmental arch bridges anywhere. Alexander marched through Lycia in the winter of 334-333 BC; after his successors came Rome, then Byzantium, the Seljuks and the Ottomans, and there are rock tombs cut into the slopes throughout the area.

The modern town is known across Turkey for its oranges. The groves run inland from the harbour, and the blossom carries through the streets in spring.

The Coast Around It

Andrea Doria Bay lies roughly three kilometres from the centre of Finike on the road towards Demre, and takes its name from the sixteenth-century Genoese admiral. Cliffs, scrub and wild olive close it in. Loggerhead turtles nest on the shore, and Mediterranean monk seals, one of the rarest seals in the world, are recorded in these waters. Gokliman is the other beach the town uses, a long pebble and shingle shore with room to camp behind it.

Between them and the islet, the coast west of Finike is a run of small coves reached more easily from the water than from the road, which is the reason most people see this stretch from a boat.