Serce Port

Serçe Limanı, or "Sparrow Harbour," sits about 14 nautical miles west of Marmaris on Turkey's rugged Datça-Bozburun coastline. Its entrance is barely 135 metres wide and hemmed in by steep cliffs, so it is easy to miss from open water, yet inside the bay opens into a deep, sheltered pool where depths drop to roughly 40 metres before shelving gently toward the shore.

That narrow mouth is exactly what makes the bay so popular with sailors: once inside, boats are almost completely protected from the wind, which is why many charter guests anchor here for the afternoon to swim and snorkel along the rocky, olive-planted slopes that ring the water.

The bay is also a site of real archaeological importance. In the late 1970s, an 11th-century Byzantine merchant ship that had sunk here while sheltering from a storm was excavated by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, yielding one of the richest glass cargoes ever recovered from the sea, much of it gathered originally from ports of the Fatimid Caliphate along the coast of present-day Lebanon or Israel. The finds are now on permanent display at the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology.