If you come to Turkey’s Bodrum Peninsula for the beach, you won’t be disappointed, said Peter Jon Lindberg in Travel + Leisure. Indeed, most of the 2.9 million yearly visitors go just to lounge on its white beach, or somewhere near the beach—or at a cliff-top resort with knockout views of the beach. This “swath of rock, sand, cypress, and cedar that reaches from Turkey’s southwest coast into the stained-glass blue of the Aegean Sea” is a slice of Mediterranean bliss. You can bask in the sun all day, being “serenaded by seabirds” and sipping a chilled glass of the licorice-flavored spirit raki. Yet if you can drag yourself from the “parade of gazelle-like women and the men who love them” along the shore, there’s plenty to see around the peninsula, too.
In 1966, the town of Bodrum was a “backwater of 5,100,” where roads were a rarity and street names nonexistent. By the mid-1970s, the seaside village’s languid charms and agreeable climate had begun to draw a select crowd of bohemians and celebrities, such as Rudolf Nureyev and Mick Jagger. Today, the peninsula is a chic escape for Turks, Brits, and many Europeans who see it as an “Aegean Saint-Tropez.” Luxury resorts now line hillsides “studded with olive trees, tangerine groves, and bursts of bougainvillea,” while Türkbükü Harbor teems with “impossibly tall” sailboats and other yachts, “their masts piercing the sky like minarets.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
