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".
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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.
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