A peaceful seaside village in Turkey

With a "pristine" two-mile beach that lies between pine-clad mountains and a turquoise sea, the village of Çıralı is "one of Turkey's best-kept secrets", says Terry Richardson in The Sunday Telegraph.

It is not far from the tourist towns of Kemer and Antalya, but unlike them, Çıralı has been spared the "scourge" of all-inclusive resort development. This is thanks to its protected status as an important nesting site for endangered loggerhead turtles, but the fact that it sits at the end of a road that winds for four "densely forested" miles down from the main coast road above also serves to limit visitors. Of course, the absence of through-traffic is a boon, and although there are now more than 100 places to stay, most buildings are one or two storeys high, many are wooden, and all are "pleasingly lost" in the trees. Some people come back to Çıralı year after year, "lured by its laid-back ambience".

Life centres on the beach, which is a mix of shingle and sand, and which shelves quite steeply in places (so young children need to be closely supervised). Turtle nests are marked with metal cages by local volunteers, but there's still bags of room for humans, too. At the southern end, there's a line of "low-key" restaurants, some "exceptionally" good, and offering "the full range of Turkish dishes", including grilled fish and "rustic" stews.

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And there's plenty more to do, including yoga classes, cycling (there are several bike hire places in the village), and beautiful walks. An hour-long hike up into the hills, takes you to the "eerily atmospheric" ruins of a Byzantine chapel and, next to it, the Chimaera, a series of natural "fire-spurting" vents in the rocks – a "dramatic" sight at dusk. A half-hour stroll along the beach brings you to the ruins of a Greco-Roman city, Olympos, where there's also a Byzantine-era villa with "crumbling" mosaics.

It's also worth hiring a car to visit Arykanda, a little over an hour away. Surrounded by "towering" peaks, it's a "breathtakingly beautiful and well-preserved" ancient city that has been "saved from the tourist hordes by its remote position".