Most people come to Demre for two things — the rock tombs at Myra and the church of St Nicholas — and leave the same afternoon. That is a shame, because the good part is the twenty kilometres of coast either side of them. Here is everything we send guests to, marked on a map, with the ones you can only reach by boat flagged as such.
Tap a number to read about it.
A schematic overview, not a navigation map — positions are relative. Use the directions link on each place to actually get there.
Lycian tombs cut straight into the cliff face, above a Roman theatre that seated around ten thousand — the largest and best preserved on this coast. Most of the city is still buried under the silt the Myros river laid down over it, which is why it gets called Anatolia’s Pompeii. Restoration work is under way, so expect parts of it to be fenced off. Five minutes from the town centre, and almost entirely without shade.
The 4th-century church where Nicholas served as bishop — the historical man behind Father Christmas — with Byzantine floor mosaics and frescoes still in place.
Myra’s ancient harbour, where Hadrian’s granary still stands, with the region’s museum built beside it. Excavation here uncovered a fifth-century synagogue — the first found anywhere on Anatolia’s Mediterranean coast — its stones still carrying menorah reliefs; in Byzantine times five churches and this one synagogue stood around the same harbour. The wetland behind it is a bird reserve with 168 recorded species. Open daily 08:30–19:00 in season, late enough to call in after a day on the boat.
A small oracle sanctuary in the marshes north-west of town, where priests once read prophecies in the movements of fish. Quiet, overgrown and almost never busy.
A hilltop city reached on foot through pine forest, with a theatre full of fallen sarcophagi and a view that carries all the way down to the sea.
Lycian streets, staircases and storerooms lying just under clear water for a kilometre and a half along Kekova island. Swimming here is forbidden — you watch it slide past from the boat.
The people who built this were the Lycians, and they were not Greeks or Persians or anybody else's subjects for most of their history. They had their own language and their own alphabet, and they governed themselves through the Lycian League — a federation in which each city sent delegates in proportion to its size, and the big cities could not simply outvote the small ones. Two thousand years later Alexander Hamilton held that league up in the Federalist Papers as an example of how a confederation ought to work.
Simena was one of those cities, built on both sides of this channel. In the second century AD a series of earthquakes dropped the whole shoreline several metres, and the seaward half of the town went under. What is left is not a ruin that fell down — it is a street plan that sank. You can follow staircases into the water, trace the walls of storerooms, and see the cut blocks of a quay that now sits below the surface.
Swimming and diving are banned along this stretch, and stopping is not allowed either. The prohibition is what has kept it intact: unlike almost every other classical site on this coast, nobody has been able to walk on it, break bits off it, or take anything home. We run the boat past at its slowest and stay outside the marked line.
The old shipyard bay, with a ruined Byzantine church standing at the waterline and stonework from the same period underwater — and here you are allowed to swim over it.
The name means shipyard, and that is what it was. On the north shore of Kekova island, in a bay deep enough to be sheltered from every direction the weather comes from, ships were pulled out, repaired and built. The cut stone slipways are still there under a metre of water.
The standing ruin at the head of the bay is Byzantine — the apse of a church, its curve still clear, with cut blocks scattered around it. The masonry underwater is older than the church and belongs to the same drowned shoreline as the Sunken City a few hundred metres east: the same earthquakes, the same drop.
Unlike the Sunken City you are allowed to swim here, and that is the point of the stop. You can float over classical stonework, which is not a thing you can do in many places.
A wide, sheltered bay of blue-green water reached through a strait watched over by the wild goats of Aşırlı island. One of the calmest anchorages on this coast.
Gökkaya is the sheltered water at the eastern end of the archipelago, and it is where boats go when the wind gets up. Aşırlı island lies across its mouth like a breakwater, which is what makes the bay work: the swell breaks outside and the water inside stays flat.
The island has wild goats on it, and they are usually visible on the skyline if you look at the right moment. The channel between Aşırlı and the mainland is the eastern of the two gates into Kekova — the western one is the strait below Kaleköy castle — and the same logic applied here in antiquity as it did there. Whoever held the narrows held the traffic.
For us it is the first proper swimming stop of the day, and early enough that the day boats coming the other way have not reached it yet.
A sea cave off Aşırlı island, and one of the last breeding sites of the Mediterranean monk seal — a species down to roughly 900 animals worldwide, around 120 of them in Turkish waters. Boats used to motor inside. Since 2025 the mouth has been chained shut and entry is banned; infrared camera traps showed how badly the visits were disturbing the seals. You can still see the cave from the water, and that is how we show it.
The cave is a monk seal nursery. Mediterranean monk seals are among the rarest large mammals on earth — roughly nine hundred left in total, about a hundred and twenty of them in Turkish waters — and they pup in exactly this kind of place: a sea cave with a hidden beach inside it, reachable only from the water.
For years tour boats motored in. Infrared camera traps set inside the cave showed what that was doing: seals repeatedly disturbed, leaving the beach, coming back late or not at all. In January 2025 the mouth of this cave and of the Blue Cave at Kaş were closed with chains, and the district governorships put up signs banning entry.
We think the closure is the right call and we do not try to get around it. You see the cave from outside, which is all anyone needs to see, and the seals get to keep the one thing they cannot do without.
The clearest water in the archipelago, at the western end of Kekova island, with ruined fortifications on the islets that guard the approach.
This is the western approach to Kekova, and it was watched the same way the eastern one was. The bay sits between Kara Ada and Topak Adası, and the low islets strung across its entrance carry ruined stonework on their high points — on the charts and locally they are the Karakol Adaları, the guard islands. Between them and the castle at Kaleköy, every way into the archipelago was overlooked from somewhere.
What survives is modest: courses of wall, the footings of a lookout, cut blocks that have slid downhill. Nobody has excavated them and they are not signposted, so what you get is the outline of a defensive system rather than a monument. Seen from the water with the strait behind them, the logic of where they were placed is obvious.
The bay itself is named for what it looks like from the deck. The bottom is pale rock and sand, the water is deep enough to be cold and clear and shallow enough to see straight through, and it is usually the calmest stop of the day.
A fishing village built in and around Lycian tombs, where the road ends and the boats begin. The sarcophagi of ancient Theimussa stand right at the shoreline.
Üçağız stands on ancient Teimiussa, and Teimiussa is a puzzle: no theatre has been found, no agora, no temple worth the name. What there is, in quantity, is graves. Sarcophagi stand along the shoreline in rows, some with their lids intact, several with reliefs, one with an inscription naming a boy called Kluwanimi.
The reading archaeologists favour is that Teimiussa was never a city in its own right but a harbour and a burial ground belonging to Kyaneai up in the hills — a working landing where goods were handled and the dead were laid, rather than a place with a council and public buildings.
The modern village grew up among the tombs rather than beside them, so a sarcophagus turns up in a garden or against a wall, which is a very Lycian arrangement. This is also where the road ends: past Üçağız there is no way on except by water.
A village with no road in. A crusader castle sits above the roofs, a Lycian sarcophagus stands in the shallows, and the ice cream at the top of the steps is homemade.
Kaleköy is what is left of Simena above water, and the castle on the hill is the reason the village is where it is. Kekova island lies parallel to the shore and leaves two narrow channels between it and the mainland. Everything sailing this coast had to come through one of them, in sight of the walls. The castle was not built to defend a town — it was built to watch a gate.
The walls you see are medieval, raised on Lycian foundations and rebuilt more than once, and inside them is something people miss because it is so small: a theatre cut into the bedrock, seating around three hundred. It is the smallest theatre in Lycia. From the top row you look straight down the channel the castle was set there to guard.
Below the village a Lycian sarcophagus stands in the shallows with its lid still on, the most photographed object in Kekova. There is no road in. The village is reached by boat or on foot, which is why it still has a hundred or so residents rather than a car park.
Where our boats leave from, with a long beach beside it. A freshwater spring runs into the sea here, and loggerhead turtles come in to feed on it.
A quiet stretch of sand and shingle east of town — shallow, warm and shaded in places. The one families pick when they want the sea without the crowd.
A long open beach at the eastern edge of the plain, with greenhouses behind it and the mountains beyond. Good for a walk and a swim at the end of the day.
Mineral springs near the shore that people here have used for their skin for generations. Warm, rich and, as you would expect from sulphur, findable by smell.
Some paths are for walking, others for feeling. The Lycian Way runs about 540 kilometres from Fethiye to Antalya, threading together the cities of a civilisation two thousand years gone — Patara, Xanthos, Aperlai, Myra, Simena, Olympos.
The Demre and Kekova stretch is one of the best of the whole route. Walkers come over the ridge into the view almost nobody else gets: the Sunken City laid out below, Kaleköy castle on its rock, the mouth of the Pirate Cave, and the archipelago running out to the horizon.
We see the same places from the other side. Osman has spent forty years reading this coast from the water while walkers read it from above — the same ruins, the same light, two ways of arriving at it. Guests who have just come off the trail often say the boat day is when the map in their head finally joins up.
Myra, the church and the museum at Andriake fill a morning. The bays and the Sunken City are a full day on the water. Trying to do both in one day means rushing the part people remember.
Visit Myra and the church before 10:00 in summer — there is almost no shade and the coach parties arrive mid-morning. The sea, by contrast, is at its warmest from July to October.
Myra, the church, Andriake, Sura and the beaches are all drivable. Kyaneai is a walk uphill from the road. The Sunken City, Tersane and Kaleköy have no road at all.
Half of this list only exists from the water. That is the day we run.