Cirali Beach

Cirali is the quiet half of one of Turkey's most photographed stretches of coast. Cirali Beach runs for roughly 3.2 kilometres of pale pebble and coarse sand in the Kemer district of Antalya province, closed off at the southern end by the ruins of ancient Olympos and at the northern end by the rocky headland of Karaburun. Unlike the resort strips further up the coast, nothing has been allowed to go up directly on the sand, and the reason is a turtle.

A Beach Kept for the Turtles

Cirali is one of the more important nesting beaches in the Mediterranean for the loggerhead sea turtle, known locally as caretta caretta. Nests have been monitored and protected here since 1994, when a local environmental association was set up to run the work alongside national conservation bodies, and the beach has been managed with lighting restrictions and limits on furniture during the summer breeding season ever since.

The numbers give a sense of the scale. Across the 2013 to 2020 seasons researchers recorded 852 nests at Cirali, an average of about 107 a season, containing some 68,400 eggs; roughly 60 per cent hatched, and 92 per cent of those hatchlings reached the sea. Counts over twenty consecutive years show nesting trending upward, which is not something that can be said of most Mediterranean nesting beaches, and the involvement of the village in that result is why Cirali is routinely held up as a model.

Backed by citrus orchards and pine-covered hills rather than hotel blocks, the beach is best reached during a gulet cruise along the Turkey coast, with boats anchoring offshore so guests can swim in clear, shallow water before walking into the village for a meal.

Olympos at the Southern End

The ruins at the southern end of the beach are those of Olympos, a Lycian port set where a stream cuts down a deep valley to the sea, a walk of around two and a half kilometres along the sand from the middle of Cirali. Olympos was one of six cities of the Lycian League entitled to three votes, the top rank in the federation. It lost that standing when it fell under the control of the pirate Zeniketes and was stormed by Roman legions under Publius Servilius Vatia; the surviving fortifications can be dated no earlier than 76 BC, the period of that campaign. The city was readmitted to the League only in the first century AD.

Christianity reached Olympos by the third century, and the fifth and sixth centuries brought a building boom that left nine three-aisled basilica churches. What you actually see today is spread through the undergrowth on both banks of the stream: a theatre, bath buildings, a Roman bridge, a temple gateway and long stretches of polygonal masonry wall, most of it half swallowed by fig and laurel.

The Flames of the Chimaera

Above the valley, a stepped path climbs to Yanartas, the burning rock the Greeks knew as the Chimaera. Gas seeping from vents across an area of about 5,000 square metres ignites on contact with air, producing flames that have been burning for at least 2,500 years. Analysis puts the gas at around 87 per cent methane, with hydrogen making up most of the remainder, and the site is the largest known land seepage of abiogenic methane anywhere on earth.

The ancients accounted for it with the story of the fire-breathing Chimaera, killed by Bellerophon from the back of the winged horse Pegasus. Pliny the Elder described the hill as burning with a flame that dies neither by day nor by night, sailors used the fires as a navigation mark, and the ruins of a temple of Hephaistos, the smith god associated with fire, sit just below the vents. The Lycian Way long-distance path runs past on its way along this coast, and the vents burn most vigorously in the winter months, when the hillside is empty and the walk up is worth doing for its own sake.