Turkey Travel Guides
Practical, up-to-date guides to Turkey’s most-loved destinations — what to do, when to visit, how to get there and where to stay, so you can plan a smooth trip.
How to use these guides
Each guide is written for real trip planning: the top things to do, the best time of year to go, how to reach the destination, and which area to base yourself in. When you are ready to book, we operate tours and tailor-made packages across every destination here.
Choose a Destination
Detailed travel guides for the places travellers ask about most. Pick a destination to start planning.
Bodrum Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Bodrum — the Aegean’s most stylish peninsula of whitewashed villages, blue-water bays, gulet cruises and a castle right on the harbour.
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Istanbul Travel Guide
How to plan a trip to Istanbul — the city that straddles two continents, where imperial mosques, the Grand Bazaar, the Bosphorus and the buzz of Taksim and İstiklal all sit side by side.
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Cappadocia Travel Guide
How to plan a trip to Cappadocia — the surreal valley of fairy chimneys, cave hotels and underground cities, famous worldwide for its sunrise hot-air balloons.
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Antalya Travel Guide
How to plan a trip to Antalya — the capital of the Turkish Riviera, where a walled old town and a yacht harbour meet long Mediterranean beaches and Roman ruins.
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Fethiye Travel Guide
How to plan a trip to Fethiye — the gateway to Turkey’s Turquoise Coast, famous for the Blue Lagoon at Ölüdeniz, blue-cruise gulets and paragliding over the sea.
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Kuşadası & Ephesus Travel Guide
How to plan a trip to Kuşadası and Ephesus — a lively Aegean resort town beside one of the best-preserved ancient cities in the Mediterranean world.
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Pamukkale Travel Guide
How to plan a trip to Pamukkale — Turkey’s dazzling white “cotton castle” of mineral terraces, crowned by the ancient spa city of Hierapolis.
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Adana Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Adana — a big, working Mediterranean city on the Seyhan River, better known to most Turks for its food than its sights, and a practical base for exploring the wider Çukurova region.
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Alaçatı Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Alaçatı — the restored Aegean stone-house town on the Çeşme Peninsula, built around a shallow windsurfing bay, cobbled lanes of boutique hotels and a well-known Saturday market.
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Alanya Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Alanya — a long sweep of sandy beaches on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, watched over by a Seljuk-era fortress and one of the country’s longest holiday seasons.
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Amasra Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Amasra — a small fortified harbour town on Turkey’s western Black Sea coast, built on a rocky peninsula between two bays and ringed by Byzantine and Genoese castle walls.
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Ankara Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Ankara — Turkey’s capital, a working government and university city built around a hilltop citadel, home to Atatürk’s mausoleum and one of the country’s finest archaeological museums.
Read the guideAntakya (Antioch) Travel Guide
A guide to Antakya, the ancient city of Antioch in Turkey’s southernmost province of Hatay — one of Christianity’s founding cities and home to one of the country’s most distinct regional cuisines.
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Ayder Travel Guide
How to plan a visit to Ayder Yaylası — a highland plateau of wooden houses, thermal springs and waterfalls in the foothills of the Kaçkar Mountains, above the Fırtına Valley.
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Ayvalık Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Ayvalık — a northern Aegean town of 19th-century Greek stone houses, olive groves and seafood, facing the Greek island of Lesbos across a narrow strait.
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Bergama (Pergamon) Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a visit to Bergama, the market town below one of the great Hellenistic capitals of the ancient world — a hilltop acropolis, a pioneering healing sanctuary and a colossal Roman temple, all within a few kilometres of each other.
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Bursa Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Bursa — the first Ottoman capital, a city of tiled mosques, silk markets and thermal springs set below the ski slopes of Uludağ.
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Çanakkale Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a visit to Çanakkale — the strait-side city that is the gateway to two of Turkey’s most significant historical landscapes: ancient Troy and the WWI battlefields of the Gallipoli peninsula.
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Çeşme Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Çeşme — the breezy Aegean town at the tip of İzmir’s peninsula, with a harbour castle, thermal-fed beaches and a short ferry crossing to Greece.
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Dalyan Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Dalyan — a laid-back river town on Turkey’s Turquoise Coast, known for its turtle beach, rock-cut tombs and slow-boat mud baths.
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Datça Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Datça — a slim, pine-covered peninsula between the Aegean and the Mediterranean, known for quiet coves, almond orchards and the ruined harbour city of Knidos at its tip.
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Didim Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Didim — a low-key Aegean beach town built around the ruins of one of antiquity’s great oracle sanctuaries, the Temple of Apollo at Didyma.
Read the guideEphesus Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a visit to Ephesus — one of the best-preserved ancient cities on the Mediterranean, with its marble Library of Celsus, a vast amphitheatre and streets you can still walk in their original stone.
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Eskişehir Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Eskişehir — a compact, canal-fronted city in Anatolia built around two large universities, a restored Ottoman old quarter and a modern art museum that draws visitors on its own merits.
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Gaziantep Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Gaziantep — southeastern Turkey’s food capital, home to the world’s largest collection of Roman mosaics and a bazaar quarter still built on copper and pistachios.
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Izmir Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Izmir — Turkey’s laid-back third city, a working Aegean port with a long seafront promenade, a historic clock tower square and some of the country’s best casual food.
Read the guideKalkan Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Kalkan — a steep, whitewashed harbour town on Turkey’s Turquoise Coast built around rooftop dining, boat trips and a small pebble bay.
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Kars Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Kars — a high, cold, wide-boulevarded border city in Turkey’s far north-east, and the gateway to Ani, the ruined medieval capital of a thousand churches.
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Kaş Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Kaş — a small, whitewashed harbour town on the Lycian coast, prized for diving, boat trips to the sunken city of Kekova and a slower pace than the bigger Riviera resorts.
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Kemer Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Kemer — a marina resort town on the Turkish Riviera where the Taurus Mountains drop straight into the Mediterranean, with the ruins of Olympos and the eternal flames of Chimaera close by.
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Konya Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Konya — the former Seljuk capital on the Anatolian plateau, home to Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, the whirling dervishes and some of Turkey’s finest Seljuk architecture.
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Mardin Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Mardin — a honey-stone city built into a hillside above the Mesopotamian plain, layered with Syriac, Kurdish, Arab and Ottoman history and still one of the most distinctive old towns in Turkey.
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Marmaris Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Marmaris — a pine-backed bay on Turkey’s southern Aegean coast built around a busy marina, a long town beach and one of the country’s liveliest nightlife strips.
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Mersin Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Mersin — Turkey’s largest Eastern Mediterranean port city, and the natural base for exploring the ancient sites and beaches of the Cilicia coast.
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Ölüdeniz Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Ölüdeniz — the enclosed turquoise lagoon and long pebble beach beneath Babadağ mountain, a short drive from Fethiye on Turkey’s Turquoise Coast.
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Patara Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Patara — an 18-kilometre sand beach backed by dunes and one of Lycia’s best-preserved ancient cities, on Turkey’s south-western coast.
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Rize Travel Guide
How to plan a visit to Rize — the terraced, tea-covered hills of Turkey’s far north-eastern Black Sea coast, and the natural gateway to the Kaçkar Mountains highlands beyond.
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Safranbolu Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Safranbolu — a UNESCO World Heritage old town of timber-framed Ottoman mansions, cobbled lanes and saffron-scented Turkish delight, tucked into a ravine in the Black Sea foothills.
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Şanlıurfa Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Şanlıurfa — a city that claims to be the birthplace of Abraham, home to the oldest known monumental structures on earth, and the source of some of Turkey’s most distinctive regional food.
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Side Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Side — a small Mediterranean resort town built directly on and around a working ancient harbour, with a Temple of Apollo standing on the water’s edge.
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Şirince Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a visit to Şirince — a small stone-and-timber village stacked up an Aegean hillside above Ephesus, known for its fruit wines, old Greek houses and quiet vineyard views.
Read the guideTarsus Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a visit to Tarsus — the birthplace of the Apostle Paul, and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.
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Trabzon Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Trabzon — Turkey’s Black Sea gateway to cliffside monasteries, alpine lakes and green highland plateaus, and a world away from the country’s Aegean and Mediterranean coasts.
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Uzungöl Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a visit to Uzungöl — a still highland lake ringed by pine forest and mist in the mountains above Trabzon, on Turkey’s eastern Black Sea coast.
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Van Travel Guide
Everything you need to plan a trip to Van — a city on the shore of Turkey’s largest lake, with a cliff-top Urartian fortress, an island church and one of the country’s most distinctive breakfast tables.
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