Palamutbuku

Palamutbükü is a bay and holiday village on the southern coast of the Datça Peninsula in Muğla province, about 25 kilometres from Datça's town centre. It is the best known of the so-called "Three Beauties", a trio of neighbouring coves that also includes Hayıtbükü and Ovabükü, and it has grown into the largest and liveliest of the three, with a small harbour used by local boats and visiting yachts. Its name comes from the palamut, or valonia oak, once harvested locally, though today the surrounding hillsides are far more closely associated with almond and olive groves.

The Three Beauties and the South Coast of the Peninsula

The Datça Peninsula is a long, narrow finger of land — around 80 kilometres from the mainland to its western tip — separating the Gulf of Gökova to the north from the Gulf of Hisarönü to the south. Its two coasts could hardly be more different. The northern shore is low and open, with long beaches raked by the meltem, the summer northerly that blows down the Aegean for weeks at a time; the southern shore, where Palamutbükü lies, is rocky and deeply indented, its coves tucked in below the ridge and largely out of the wind. That is the practical reason gulets and sailing yachts favour this side of the peninsula in July and August.

The village stretches along roughly two kilometres of partly sandy, partly pebbled shore, backed by small family-run restaurants and pensions rather than large resorts. The land behind belongs to the old inland settlements of Cumalı and Yakaköy, two of the five western villages known collectively as Betçe — the others being Mesudiye, Sındı and Yazıköy — which were built on the hillsides rather than on the water, a habit that goes back to centuries of coastal raiding. The harbour itself is modest, used mainly by day-trip boats and local craft; depths alongside the breakwater reach only about four metres, so larger yachts generally lie off the beach rather than come inside.

Datça district as a whole covers 436 square kilometres and had a permanent population of 25,029 at the 2022 census, a figure that multiplies many times over in summer. The peninsula is reached by road from Marmaris, or by the car ferry that crosses from Bodrum to Körmen on the north coast, roughly ten kilometres from Datça town.

Knidos and the Canal the Knidians Abandoned

A short distance west of Palamutbükü, at Cape Krio on the very tip of the peninsula, stand the ruins of Knidos, one of the most important Greek cities of ancient Caria. Knidos belonged to the Dorian Hexapolis, the six-city league that also included Halicarnassus, Kos and the three Rhodian cities of Lindos, Kamiros and Ialysos, whose members gathered on the Triopian headland for assemblies and for games in honour of Apollo. The city was built partly on the mainland and partly on the island of Triopion, which gave it two harbours; the larger southern one was closed off by two heavily built moles whose lines can still be traced.

Its reputation rested on more than trade. The astronomer and mathematician Eudoxus came from Knidos, as did Sostratus, the architect credited with the Pharos lighthouse at Alexandria, and the city commissioned from Praxiteles the Aphrodite of Knidos, the most famous statue by the ancient world's most famous sculptor; the original is lost, but Roman copies survive. Between 1857 and 1858 the British archaeologist Charles Thomas Newton excavated the site and shipped the colossal Lion of Knidos and a seated Demeter back to the British Museum, where both remain. The city was still populated well into the Byzantine period, and its bishops attended church councils between 451 and 787.

Herodotus preserves the strangest episode in its history. When the Persian general Harpagus advanced through Caria in the 540s BC, the Knidians began cutting a canal across the narrow neck of land joining the peninsula to the mainland, intending to turn their territory into an island and defend it more easily. The workmen were badly injured by splinters of flying rock, and when the oracle at Delphi was consulted it told them to stop — had the gods wanted their land to be an island, they would have made it one. The Knidians put down their tools and gave up the city without a fight. Sediment cores taken across the isthmus have since found traces consistent with a cutting some 14 to 15 metres deep, which fits the account remarkably well. Excavations at Burgaz, near Datça town, have meanwhile identified the earlier settlement known as Palaia Knidos, or Old Knidos, investigated by teams from Middle East Technical University over more than two decades.

Almonds, Protected Waters and When to Come

Almonds are the peninsula's signature crop. Muğla province — and Datça district above all — supplies close to a third of the entire Aegean region's almond harvest, and the local variety, Datça Nurlu, was put forward for geographical-indication protection in 2016. The trees flower at the end of winter, well ahead of anything else, and since 2018 the district has marked it with a four-day Almond Blossom Festival in the middle of February, with events spread between Datça town and the peninsula's villages: local produce stalls, seminars, workshops, concerts and folk dancing. It is the one time of year when the peninsula is busy outside the sailing season.

The waters themselves are protected. On 22 October 1990 the Datça and Bozburun peninsulas were together declared a Specially Protected Area; with a marine component of about 737 square kilometres it is the largest such zone on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, and it shelters Mediterranean monk seals, loggerhead turtles and sandbar sharks, alongside no-fishing zones and a string of natural and archaeological conservation sites. For yacht charters working their way along Turkey's southern Aegean coast, Palamutbükü's combination of a sheltered bay, beaches and nearby ruins has made it a long-standing favourite, and it is worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet in Turkey looking to break up a day of sailing with something more than just another anchorage.