Orak Island

Orak Island is a small, uninhabited outcrop of limestone and olive trees lying in the Gulf of Gökova, within the Bodrum district of Muğla province and roughly sixteen kilometres from Bodrum town itself. Its longer axis measures about 1,800 metres, there is a lighthouse and essentially nothing else in the way of building, and its reputation rests almost entirely on what happens at its edges: a run of clear, sheltered coves on one side and one of the better-known dive walls on the Turkish Aegean coast on the other.

Where Orak Island Sits

The Gulf of Gökova is a long, narrow arm of the Aegean running roughly 100 kilometres inland between the Bodrum peninsula to the north and the Datça peninsula to the south, with the Greek island of Kos lying off its entrance. In antiquity it was the Ceramic Gulf, named after the city of Ceramus on its northern shore. Bodrum is the only large town on it today; at the far eastern end the coast flattens out into the plain around Akyaka and Gökova. Going clockwise, the shoreline is divided between the districts of Bodrum, Milas, Muğla, Ula, Marmaris and Datça, and the scattering of islands within it includes Sedir, the site of ancient Cedrae, whose beach still draws day boats from the eastern end of the gulf.

Orak lies in the western, seaward part of the gulf, off the southern side of the Bodrum peninsula. That position matters more than the raw distance does. The island is far enough out to make a proper passage rather than a hop, which is why it turns up on multi-day cruising itineraries far more often than on half-day excursions, and it is exposed enough to feel the meltem, the thermal wind that builds through the afternoon from June to September and drops away around sunset. Skippers pick their side of the island accordingly.

Nothing grows on Orak but old olive groves and low scrub. There is no pine forest, and that alone gives it a paler, drier character than the wooded coves of the mainland shore nearby. The island has never carried a settlement; the olives are the remnant of cultivation worked from the coast rather than of any village on the island itself.

Diving and Swimming off the Southern Cape

The cape at the island's southern end is the reason a lot of boats come at all. The seabed there falls away almost vertically very close to shore, and dive operators working the site put the wall at somewhere around 80 metres. Divers follow the rock face down past overhangs and pillars, and there is a cave at roughly thirty metres that is usually described for the sponge growth covering its walls. It is a wall dive in the most literal sense: you trace the contour, and the depth is entirely a question of how far down you choose to go.

For anyone staying at the surface, the same geology is what makes the snorkelling worth the stop. Because the drop-off begins so close in, you can slip off the boat and be over deep blue water within a few metres of the rock, with the visibility that clear, current-swept water tends to bring. The coves on the northern and eastern sides of the island are the opposite: shallower, calmer, with sandy patches on the bottom, and these are where boats generally lie overnight.

A Protected Gulf

Gökova is not a neutral piece of water. Selected marine and coastal areas of the gulf were declared a Special Environmental Protection Area in 1988, and it has since become the largest marine protected area in Turkey. Six no-fishing zones, covering some 27 square kilometres between them, are enforced with community ranger patrols, and the results have been documented in detail, including a sharp recovery in the biomass of large predatory fish inside the closed zones.

The gulf is a breeding and feeding ground for the endangered Mediterranean monk seal and for the sandbar shark, and dusky grouper have come back to the protected areas in numbers that had not been seen for years. Three of the six zones still allow shore-based fishing, on the reasoning that small-scale gear does little damage to stocks, and the income of the small boats working the gulf rose several times over across the years that followed the closures. Anyone swimming or diving here is doing so inside an active conservation project rather than simply a pretty bay, and the restrictions are taken seriously by the crews who work this coast.

Reaching Orak from Bodrum

Bodrum is ancient Halicarnassus, where the tomb built for the Carian ruler Mausolus, who died in 353 BC, gave the world both the word mausoleum and one of the Seven Wonders. After it collapsed, the Knights Hospitaller quarried its stone for the Castle of St Peter, begun in 1402 and still standing over the harbour. Work on it ran for more than a century, with separate towers raised and maintained by the English, French, German, Italian and Spanish knights, and the building today houses Bodrum's museum of underwater archaeology. The town's other long tradition is boatbuilding, and the wooden gulets that work this coast are its direct descendants.

From that harbour, Orak is a straightforward passage rather than a day-trip destination. It is one of the anchorages you'll visit on a private gulet charter from Bodrum that has the time to head properly into the gulf, usually taken on the way out towards Çökertme, the Seven Islands and the deeper eastern bays, or on the way back in at the end of the week. There are no facilities of any kind on the island, no water, no shop and no jetty, so everything you need arrives with the boat.