The Best Places to Visit in Olympos

The Olympos ruins spread through the creek valley for nearly 2 km — you enter through a small ticket gate and follow the stream through dense vegetation. Key sights include a Hellenistic harbour gateway, Roman baths, Byzantine churches and numerous carved Lycian sarcophagi. The ruins are best explored in early morning before the heat builds.

Yanartaş (Burning Rock) — the ancient Chimera — is a hillside above Olympos where natural methane gas seeping through fissures in the rock has been burning continuously for at least 2,500 years. The ancient Greeks associated these flames with the fire-breathing Chimera monster; the fires were also used by Lycian sailors to navigate at night. A 25-minute uphill walk from the road; most atmospheric at dusk and after dark.

The Olympos beach at the mouth of the valley — accessible only by walking through the ruins — is one of the finest unspoilt beaches on the Turkish Riviera: a wide pebbly bay with extraordinarily clear, deep-blue water, backed by forested mountains. No hotels, no parasols, no facilities beyond a simple beach bar. Loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) nest here.

Phaselis, 30 km north of Olympos, is another extraordinary Lycian–Roman coastal city — where Alexander the Great wintered in 333 BCE. The ruins include an aqueduct, a main colonnaded street, three harbours (one still visible) and a triumphal arch, all set among pine forests on a series of small bays. Often quieter than Olympos and equally beautiful.

The Olympos treehouse camps— guesthouses with platforms built into the trees along the creek valley — have been a travellers’ institution since the late 1970s. The most famous camps (Kadir’s, Bayrams, Orange Tree) offer simple wooden accommodation with communal meals and campfire evenings. The experience of sleeping in the trees within earshot of an ancient city is genuinely unique.