Arap Island

Arap Adası, or Arap Islet, is a small uninhabited island lying just off the Anatolian mainland in the Marmaris district of Muğla province. It is genuinely tiny, with an area of roughly 0.025 square kilometres, and the channel separating it from the coast is no more than six metres deep, so it reads less like an island in open water than a fragment of shoreline that has come loose. Turkish geographical references place it on the notional dividing line between the Aegean and the Mediterranean, which is part of the reason it turns up so often in descriptions of this coast.

The islet itself

Nothing is built on Arap Adası: no jetty, no facilities, no permanent population. Pine-covered slopes come down almost to the water on the mainland side, the beaches are narrow strips of pebble rather than sand, and the seabed is rock and shingle, which is why most people swimming here bring water shoes. The shallow channel is what makes the anchorage work, keeping the water between islet and shore calm and unusually transparent. That combination of green hills, clear water and no buildings is what has made the spot a fixture on day-boat itineraries out of Marmaris.

The name is usually explained locally as a reference to Arab sailors said to have used this coast in the distant past. It is worth treating that as tradition rather than documented history; no archaeological or textual record confirms it, and place names along this shoreline have been accumulating stories for centuries.

The peninsula around it

Arap Adası sits in the southeastern corner of the Marmaris district, along the deeply indented coast of the Bozburun peninsula, which runs some 34 kilometres southwest of Marmaris. The whole peninsula was the heart of the Rhodian Peraea, the mainland territory held by Rhodes from around the middle of the fourth century BC, and it is scattered with remains from that period. The most striking stands at Bozukkale, ancient Loryma, near the peninsula's southern tip: a fortress 334 metres long, with walls two metres thick and originally nine rectangular towers, built almost directly opposite the island of Rhodes and probably meant to deny the harbour to hostile fleets. Bozukkale means "broken castle." Four kilometres outside the nearby village of Taşlıca lie the remains of the Carian settlement of Phoenix.

Protected coastline

This stretch falls within one of Turkey's larger protected landscapes. Marmaris National Park was established on 30 January 1996 and covers roughly 33,350 hectares of Turkish red pine forest, maquis, olive groves and coastline, with more than 500 recorded plant species, over fifty of them endemic. That protection is a large part of why the coves here still look the way they do, with almost no construction visible from the water, and why the wooded slopes run unbroken down to the shoreline.

Visiting by boat

Arap Adası works as a lunch stop rather than a destination in its own right, and it appears on multi-day sailing routes out of Marmaris alongside Serçe Limanı, Bozukkale, Bozburun and Kadırga. Day boats from Marmaris harbour and private charters both call in, and there is no admission of any kind, since there is nothing ashore to charge for. July and August bring the warmest water, though those are also the months when the meltemi blows hardest along this coast, so skippers pick their moment. In practice many charter guests anchor here for the afternoon before continuing along the coast, swim off the boat, and move on to an overnight anchorage further round the peninsula.