Things to do
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Antiphellus Theatre
A Hellenistic theatre about 500 metres west of the town centre, built for some four thousand spectators and restored in 2008. It was never given a stone stage building, so the rows face straight out to sea, and the site is unfenced and free to enter. The town holds jazz concerts here, and sunset is the time to come.
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Kaputaş Beach
A short strip of white shingle at the mouth of a gorge between Kaş and Kalkan, reached down a staircase of about 170 steps from the coast road. The water is startlingly blue, deepens close to shore and has almost no shade. Toilets, showers and a cafe sit on the sand, and roadside parking is limited.
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Kekova
An uninhabited island whose north shore carries the walls, stairs and doorways of a Lycian town that slid into the sea in a second-century earthquake. Swimming and anchoring over the ruins are banned, and boats run daily from Üçağız.
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Patara Beach
Eighteen kilometres of dune-backed sand behind the ruins, a protected loggerhead nesting site that closes at dusk from May to October and has no building on it at all. The sand is fine, the water shallow and the wind almost constant, and the dunes once stood in for the desert in Turkish films. Access runs through the archaeological site gate, so the ruins and the beach make one day.
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Simena
A castle village on the Kekova shore with no road to it, reached by boat, where a Lycian sarcophagus stands in the shallows and a medieval fort built against the Kekova pirates holds a tiny rock-cut theatre. Parts of the ancient town and its baths lie underwater just offshore.
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Kaş Harbour
The working harbour below the town square, where the dive boats and the Kastellorizo ferry tie up and the evening crowd walks. Most of the town's dive centres operate from here, running trips to some fifty sites nearby, including a sunken DC-3 aircraft and an underwater shark sculpture. The lanes behind it hold the old Greek houses.
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Patara
The chief port of Lycia and the seat of its federal assembly, with the restored council chamber, a colonnaded street partly re-erected, a triple-arched city gate of about 100 AD and a lighthouse of 60 AD rebuilt from its own blocks. Saint Nicholas was born here, and the old harbour is now a swamp choked with sand and scrub.
