Turkey Guide
The Turquoise Coast
Kaş
Tourism has utterly transformed Kaş. It first sprang to prominence after about 1850, and until 1923 was a Greek-populated timber-shipping port known as Andifli. It's always been appealingly nestled in a curving bay – the name Kaş means "eyebrow" or "something curved" – with a backdrop of vertical, 500-metre-high cliffs peppered with rock-tombs, and startling, head-on views of Greek Kastellórizo. But what was a sleepy fishing village until the early 1980s has become a holiday metropolis, whose permanent population of 8000 is vastly outnumbered in summer by the vacationers on whom locals depend for a living. Attitudes towards outsiders have inevitably hardened – the otogar is predictably well patrolled by accommodation touts – though they're not yet like those encountered at Selçuk or Pamukkale. Residential tourism is not so developed as at Dalyan or Kalkan, so Kaş remains less snooty, more youth-oriented and more cosmopolitan; aspiring İstanbul and Ankara yuppies flock here, while amongst foreigners it's still firmly established on the backpackers' trail.
There's no beach to speak of in Kaş itself, or anywhere nearby, which together with the lack of a really convenient airport, has spared the town the full impact of modern tourism. Indeed, if you're not looking for antiques and carpets, at first glance there seems little to keep you here. However, the town gets lively at night, since shops stay open until 1am in season – and the various bars much later than that. If you don't have your own transport, Kaş also makes a handy base from which to reach Kekova and nearby Patara, and various types of adventure tourism are beginning to take off. The modern town is built atop the site of ancient Antiphellos, whose remaining ruins still speckle the streets, as well as covering the base of the peninsula to the west.
Dive sites
There are close to sixty dive sites in the area, with lots of new discoveries since the millennium; many of these are on the flank of the Çukurbağlı peninsula, with most of the others around the islets at the marine frontier with Greek Kastellórizo. Beginners might visit a tunnel at 15m and a shoreline cave fed by an icy freshwater spring in Bayındır Limanı, or the shallower reaches of "Stone Edge" or Güvercin Adası, areas off the Çukurbağ peninsula. Moderately experienced divers may be taken to the site known as "Canyon", where beginning in four-metre depths they drop through the namesake formation past a reasonably intact Greek cotton-carrying freighter that ran aground here in the 1960s. This was later dynamited to remove the navigational hazard, with its stern lodging in 35m of water. Next there's a traverse of a big-wall dropoff, and then a return north with prevailing currents via a tunnel system at 15–18m. Only advanced divers using nitrox or triox tanks can visit the wreck of a World War II bomber shot down between Kaş and Kastellórizo, resting nearly intact in 65m of water at the site called "Flying Fish", just beyond "Canyon".
Fish you're likely to see – at their best in August or September – includes grouper, barracuda, amberjack and the occasional ray; smaller species typically seen include cardinal fish, damselfish, parrotfish, flying fish, ornate wrasse and schools of bream or pandora.
Read more ▼
- Sight(s) ▼
- Sports and Outdoor ▼