Things to do
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Butterfly Valley
A beach at the mouth of a steep gorge reached only by boat from Ölüdeniz or by a marked scramble down from Faralya. The Jersey tiger moths it is named for are there in high summer.
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Fethiye Museum
The town museum, holding the Lycian material from Telmessos, Tlos and Kaunos including the trilingual Letoon stele that helped decipher the Lycian language. It takes about an hour.
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Gemiler Island
An island off the Kayaköy coast carrying five Byzantine churches and a covered processional way, thought to be a stop on the pilgrim route and possibly the burial place of Saint Nicholas. Boats run from Ölüdeniz.
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Ölüdeniz
The lagoon under Babadağ, a shingle spit enclosing still turquoise water that is a protected nature park and ticketed at the gate. Paragliders come down onto the beach through the afternoon.
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Tomb of Amyntas
A Lycian rock tomb of about 350 BC cut as a temple front into the cliff above the town, reached by a long stair. The other tombs around it are unlit and the view over the harbour is best at dusk.
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Babadağ
The 1,969-metre mountain above Ölüdeniz, with launch platforms at 1,700 and 1,800 metres that make it one of the busiest tandem paragliding sites in the world. A cable car opened in 2021 for anyone not flying down.
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Hillside Beach Club
A resort filling its own bay at Kalemya, five kilometres from Fethiye, with three beaches and no road access to any of them but its own. It has run since 1989 and is booked mostly by returning families.
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Kabak Bay
A steep valley of pine and treehouse camps south of Faralya, ending in a shingle beach reached by a rough track or a forty-minute walk down. It is the last stop before the coast turns wild.
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Kayaköy
The Greek town of Levissi, emptied by the 1923 population exchange and never resettled, with about three hundred roofless stone houses and two churches on the hillside. It is a ticketed site and takes about two hours.
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Lycian Way
A waymarked long-distance path of about 760 kilometres from Fethiye to Antalya, the first such route in Turkey, laid out along Roman roads and goat tracks above the coast. Most walkers do it in sections in spring or autumn.
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Saklıkent Gorge
An eighteen-kilometre slot canyon in the Akdağ range, entered on a boardwalk pinned to the rock and then waded upstream through water that stays cold all summer. It closes in spring while the snowmelt runs.