Kumluca

Kumluca is a district of Antalya Province about 90 kilometres west of the city, on the Teke Peninsula, its town centre set on a coastal plain hemmed in by mountains on three sides. The 2022 census counted 73,496 residents across the district, with 42,861 living in the town itself. It was formerly the village of Sarıkavak and takes its present name from the sandy soil, kum being Turkish for sand, that suited watermelon growing. Greenhouse farming has since made it one of the wealthiest agricultural districts on the Turkish Riviera, producing fruit and vegetables under glass all year round alongside extensive orange groves.

Lycian Cities in the Hills

The district holds an unusual concentration of ancient sites: Olympos, Rhodiapolis, Korydalla, Idebessos, Kitanaura and Gagai all lie within its boundaries. Rhodiapolis, on a hill just north-west of the modern town, was probably founded by settlers from Rhodes, its name meaning simply "Rhodian city", and it stayed modest through the Hellenistic period before expanding under Rome. It produced Lycia's most celebrated benefactor, Opramoas, who between 140 and 143 AD gave something in the order of 500,000 denarii to 28 Lycian cities to repair earthquake damage and paid for two temples in his home town. The monument raised in his honour carries the longest inscription known in Lycia. Rhodiapolis held only one vote in the Lycian League yet minted its own coins, and its theatre cavea is the sole surviving structure there from the late Hellenistic period. The ruins were identified in 1842 by the British surveyor T. A. B. Spratt, but systematic excavation began only in 2006 under Nevzat Çevik.

Olympos, at the eastern end of the district near Çıralı, was one of the six leading members of the Lycian League and carried three votes. In the first century BC it fell under the control of the pirate chief Zeniketes; when the Roman commander Publius Servilius Vatia besieged his stronghold, Zeniketes burned himself and his family alive rather than be taken. Olympos was expelled from the League after that campaign and not readmitted until the first century AD. Its ruins now sit in a river valley behind a pebble beach, reached on foot through the gorge.

Wrecks and Treasure

The water off Kumluca has produced two finds of international importance. At Cape Gelidonya, on the seaward edge of the peninsula between the Gulf of Antalya and the Bay of Finike, a Bronze Age wreck of around 1200 BC was located in 1954 and excavated in 1960 by Peter Throckmorton, George Bass, Joan du Plat Taylor and Frédéric Dumas. It was the first ancient shipwreck ever excavated in its entirety on the seabed, and its cargo of copper and tin ingots, Mycenaean pottery and merchants' weights reshaped what was known about Late Bronze Age trade. In 2019 archaeologists located a still older wreck barely 50 metres off the Kumluca shore, dated to the 15th or 16th century BC.

On land, a grazing goat led in 1963 to the discovery of the hoard known as the Sion or Kumluca Treasure: between 53 and 58 silver and gold liturgical objects, among them plates, crosses, candlesticks and book covers, associated with the monastery of Holy Sion and thought to have been buried in the seventh century. Much of it left the country and was sold through the dealer Georges Zacos, and the collection remains divided between the Antalya Museum and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, with Turkey pressing for its return.

The Coast, Adrasan and the Lycian Way

Roughly 30 kilometres of shoreline between the villages of Adrasan and Olympos mixes small hotels and restaurants with long stretches of undeveloped bay. Adrasan itself, a neighbourhood of Kumluca with about 2,600 residents, spreads along 2.5 kilometres of sand and shingle; underwater visibility there can reach 25 metres on a clear day, and it is the main departure point for day boats to the uninhabited island of Suluada, some four nautical miles offshore. The Lycian Way footpath runs through the district, and from Adrasan it is less than half a day's walk either south to the lighthouse at Cape Gelidonya or north towards the eternal flames of Yanartaş, where methane seeping from the rock has kept fires burning across about 5,000 square metres for at least 2,500 years. The ruins of a temple of Hephaistos stand just below the vents, and in 1811 the surveyor Francis Beaufort argued that this was the Chimaera of Greek myth.

The whole strip sits firmly in the Mediterranean climate belt, with hot dry summers and cool wet winters, and much of the mountain backdrop is protected as the Beydağları Coastal National Park. Its highest summit, Tahtalı Dağı at 2,366 metres, rises just beyond the district boundary in neighbouring Kemer and holds snow from November into June; a cable car 4,350 metres long, opened on 16 June 2007, carries up to 480 people an hour to the top in about ten minutes.

Getting Out on the Water

Many of the finest coves on this coast, Sazak and Ceneviz and Akseki among them, have no road access at all and can only be reached by sea, which is why the stretch is so heavily used by day boats out of Adrasan and by longer cruises working between Antalya and Fethiye. That combination of ancient sites and sheltered anchorages makes Kumluca worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet in Turkey, letting you pair a swim in a roadless bay with an afternoon among Lycian ruins.