Ufakdere Bay

Ufakdere, written Fakdere on some charts, is a narrow inlet on the Lycian coast of Antalya Province, on the stretch of shoreline between Kas and Kekova. It lies roughly twelve kilometres from the centre of Kas, twenty to thirty minutes away by road and about half an hour under power by boat, and it is one of the regular anchorages for gulets working the Kas to Kekova run.

The Anchorage and the Shore

The cove is cut into the coast like a small fjord, with steep rock walls on either side and room for only a handful of boats at a time. The bottom is sand and holds well, but the inlet deepens quickly towards the middle and the sides are sheer, so there is very little room to swing and most skippers take a long line ashore. The bay is open to winds out of the north-east, which is worth checking before committing to a night here. Ashore there is a simple beach set-up with tents, showers and toilets rather than a restaurant, and camping among the trees is common; anyone wanting a proper meal goes back into Kas.

The water is clear and the shoreline rocky rather than sandy, which makes the bay better for snorkelling than for lying on a beach, and the shelter suits sea kayaking and first open-water dives. Ancient remains are scattered through the scrub around the cove, including sarcophagi, cisterns and the traces of older settlement, the ordinary background of a coast that was densely occupied in Lycian times. The Lycian Way runs along this same shore: its stage from Kas through Limanagzi to Uzumlu covers some fifteen kilometres of rocky coastal path, olive terraces and pine forest, passing rock-cut tombs at Limanagzi on the way up to the hillside village.

Protected Water and Bronze Age Wrecks

The whole area falls inside the Kas-Kekova Special Environmental Protection Area, which covers about 258 square kilometres, some 92 of them at sea. Roughly a thousand marine species have been recorded there, meadows of the seagrass Posidonia oceanica grow across the shallows, and the Mediterranean monk seal, along with loggerhead and green turtles, uses the coast for feeding and breeding. Since 2019 trained marine rangers have patrolled the zone in cooperation with local authorities to keep illegal fishing and pollution out of it.

This is also the single most important stretch of water in the world for Bronze Age nautical archaeology. Off Uluburun cape, about six miles south-east of Kas, a sponge diver named Mehmed Cakir spotted what he described as metal biscuits with ears in 1982. They turned out to be copper ingots from a ship that sank in the late fourteenth century BC. The Institute of Nautical Archaeology excavated the wreck across eleven seasons between 1984 and 1994, logging 22,413 dives at depths of 44 to 52 metres, and recovered 354 oxhide copper ingots weighing some ten tonnes, roughly a tonne of tin, around 175 raw glass ingots and at least 149 Canaanite jars. The finds are displayed in the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology, and the wreck site itself remains a fixture on the dive itineraries running out of Kas.

Because the inlet is so sheltered and sits so close to that route, many charter guests anchor here for the afternoon on longer itineraries out of Kas, combining a swim in the clear water with a walk up onto the coastal path above.