Along the Turquoise Coast Part 2: Patara
“Patara can claim Turkey’s longest uninterrupted [sandy] beach as well as some of Lycia’s finest ruins”. It was this statement in The Lonely Planet Guide to Turkey that first drew my attention to this area, and it is also the birthplace of St. Nicholas (now known as Santa Claus).
Located approximately a one hour drive from Fethiye, or 20 minutes from Kalkan, Patara is an 18km stretch of beautiful sandy beach which is also a nesting area for sea turtles. Development of the area has been strictly controlled because of the turtles so there is only one building on the beach offering refreshments and changing facilities. If you want to stay close to the beach you will find friendly pansiyons, (like the wonderful Akay where we stayed http://www.pataraakaypension.com) bars and restaurants in the village of Gelemiş, which is approximately 3km away from the beach. Most of the pansiyons serve set menu dinners from about 15TL per head and eating at the Akay Pansiyon comes highly recommended.
On the main road from Gelemiş that leads to the beach you will come across a ticket gate where you will have to pay a fee of 5TL per person to gain entry to the Lycian ruins, and beyond them the small car park and access to the beach. You can drive yourself through here, walk or hop on a dolmuş. There is alternative free access to just the beach a few kilometres north-west of the village of Gelemiş, ask directions from someone in the village. If you want seclusion and don’t mind not having any facilities then I would definitely advise this alternative access, but you should expect an exhausting trudge across the sand dunes for several hundred metres first to reach the sea! The beach is rarely anything close to crowded and definitely nothing like a Bodrum style beach where the phrase ‘packed in like sardines’ usually springs to mind! Some areas are off limits for the turtles’ protection and the beach is closed at night.
At the ruins end of the beach, along with the basic café and toilet facilities, beach umbrellas and sun loungers are provided for a fee (umbrella 4TL, sun bed 3TL). Apparently it can get quite windy and the water quite choppy (for the Mediterranean at least) over the summer months of July and August, but when we visited at the end of May the weather was lovely for catching some sun on the beach whilst the sea was just about warm enough to take a dip!
The ruins consist of a triple-arched gateway, a theatre, a bath complex and acropolis among others but, as always in Turkey, are not particularly well marked so taking a guide book is very useful. The ruins are spaced out and some are quite overgrown. You will probably have to keep backtracking between each site and the main road as the tracks don’t seem to connect, so make sure you are prepared with sensible footwear and plenty of water.
There are numerous other ruins in the surrounding region such as the UNESCO World Heritage site of Letoon which is only about a 15 minute drive away, and the isolated ruins at Pınara. Also Tlos, Xanthos and the Saklıkent Gorge are within easy distance of Patara. Slightly further afield you will come across Myra where there are some wonderful examples of Lycian rock tombs carved into the cliff and a well-preserved Roman theatre, close by to the Church of St. Nicholas at Demre. There is also the Kekova regions’ sunken city to admire from your kayak (day trips can be organised from Kaş and Kalkan).
Other articles in this series: