Kaş

What Kaş actually is

Kaş is a harbour town of a few thousand people on the Lycian coast between Kalkan and Demre, built on a slope so steep that much of it is stairs rather than street. Lycian rock tombs stand in residential lanes. A carved sarcophagus sits in the road on Uzun Çarşı, the old shopping street, with cars going round it. Above the houses the King's Tomb is cut into the cliff, and on the western edge a small Hellenistic theatre looks out over the water. Across the bay lies the Greek island of Meis.

What Kaş is not is a beach resort. It has no beach in the sense Belek or Side has one, almost no all-inclusive hotels, and no aquapark. Instead it has the clearest water in Turkey, the best cluster of dive schools in the country, and a bougainvillea-hung centre where people eat outside every night of the season. That suits one kind of traveller and disappoints everyone else, which is why this page spends as much space on who should not come as on who should.

First, the honest part: there is no sand

Walkable from the centre, heading east, are two small pebble bays. Küçük Çakıl is tiny and mostly platform. Büyük Çakıl is larger, with pebble you can lie on and a couple of beach clubs. Neither is a beach in the sense a family with a bucket and spade means.

Most hotels solve the problem with a swim platform: a deck with sunbeds, a ladder, and eight metres of water immediately below. The water is exceptionally clear and adults who swim love it. It is also, plainly, a ladder into deep water.

Kaputaş is the picture everybody has seen: pale pebble between two cliffs with turquoise water, twenty minutes west on the road towards Kalkan, reached by a long flight of steps down from the roadside. Worth the trip, no place for a pushchair, and full by mid-morning in July.

For actual sand you drive. Patara, about forty-five minutes west, is an eighteen-kilometre dune beach behind an ancient city. That is a day out, not a morning.

Diving, which is the real reason to come

Kaş is the best diving base in Turkey, and that is not a slogan. It is the reason the town has the hotel stock it has.

The water is clear by Mediterranean standards, with visibility that regularly runs twenty to thirty metres through summer and autumn. Dive sites sit within a short boat ride of the harbour rather than an hour offshore, so a two-dive morning still gets you back for lunch. There are walls that drop away vertically, caverns and canyons, and deliberate artificial reefs including a sunken aircraft and a small ship put down for divers. Amphorae lie on some sites. Water temperature holds into November, and the schools keep running when the coast further north has closed for the year.

A cluster of long-established schools works out of the harbour. Try-dives for people who have never breathed underwater run daily through the season, open-water certification takes three to four days, and technical and cave courses run for experienced divers. If one half of the party dives and the other does not, the non-diver still gets the boat and the swim stops.

Kekova, sea kayaking and days out

The most-booked day out from Kaş is the sea kayak trip over the sunken city at Kekova. Part of an ancient Lycian settlement slid into the sea in an earthquake, and you paddle over stairs, walls and foundations lying in two or three metres of clear water, finishing under the castle at Simena.

Beyond that: the Lycian Way runs through the hills behind the town, and several waymarked sections make good half-day walks with a taxi back. Saklıkent gorge is a couple of hours away, and Patara and Xanthos combine into one solid day of ruins. There is also a ferry to Meis, or Kastellorizo, a crossing of roughly half an hour, but it is an international crossing: you need your passport, many nationalities need a Greek visa, and a single-entry Turkish visa makes the return a problem. Check that before you build a day around it.

Where to stay

The town centre

Walkable, flat along the harbour and steep behind it, and the right choice if you want to eat somewhere different every night and walk home afterwards. The trade-off is noise: a handful of bars run late in July and August.

Küçük Çakıl and Büyük Çakıl

The two bay-side clusters just east of the centre. Ten to fifteen minutes on foot from the restaurants, with sea access on the doorstep. For most people this is the best compromise.

The Çukurbağ peninsula

The headland west of town, and where most of the boutique, design and adults-only hotels are. Sea platforms, views back over the roofs and across to Meis, real quiet. It is not walkable to the harbour, so plan on taxis or a hire car every evening.

Çukurbağ village and the Kalkan road

Inland and west: cheaper, quieter, small pensions and villas. You need a car here, without exception.

Hotel stock and what the price actually covers

Kaş hotels are small. Ten to forty rooms is normal, and a hundred-room property counts as large. At the bottom are family-run pensions, in the middle are comfortable small hotels with a pool and a terrace, and at the top are design and adults-only boutiques on the peninsula. Room and breakfast is the standard board basis, half board exists in some houses, and all-inclusive effectively does not exist in town at all.

This is where price comparisons go wrong, so read this part carefully. The indicative anchor for Kaş is quoted per room per night — one room, normally shared by two people — and it almost always buys the room and breakfast only. Every lunch, every dinner and every drink is bought in town, on top of it.

An all-inclusive resort anchor is quoted per person per night and swallows all the food and drink. So a per-room number will always look dramatically cheaper than a per-person number, and the two are not comparable until you do the sum yourself. The sum is simple: take the per-room rate, divide it by two, then add a realistic daily food and drink figure per person. Eating out in Kaş is not expensive by European standards, but two people having dinner and a drink spend a meaningful amount every single day, and across a week that changes the total materially. Do that arithmetic before you conclude that Kaş is cheap.

Getting there

Kaş is a long way from every airport, and that distance is the price of it staying unspoilt.

Dalaman (DLM) is the nearer one, roughly two and a half hours west along the coast road. Antalya (AYT) is the other option at a little over three hours, and it is the airport a great many guests actually arrive at because it has far more flights. Neither is short, and no amount of planning makes them short.

Transfers inside Turkey we run ourselves, with our own vehicles and our own drivers, and have done since 2016. The driver waits inside the arrivals hall with a name board, the price is quoted per vehicle rather than per person, and your flight is tracked, so a late landing does not lose you the car.

A word on the drive itself. It is the D400, mountains on one side and sea on the other, and it is genuinely scenic rather than tedious. There are long winding sections, particularly above Kalkan. If anyone in the party gets travel sick, say so when you request the transfer so the driver can plan for it, and expect a stop somewhere in the middle. On a run this long a break is normal rather than an inconvenience.

When to go

May and June are the best months: warm, still green, the sea coming up to temperature, everything open and not yet full. September and October are the other good window, and the sea holds its warmth into late October while diving carries on into November. July and August are hot, busy and expensive, and a town built on a hill is hard work at midday, so plan around mornings and evenings if those are your only dates. From December to March a large part of Kaş simply closes: many hotels and restaurants shut for the winter, though the dive schools and a handful of hotels stay open and the town is quiet, cheap and wet.

Eating

Kaş eats out every night, and that belongs in the budget as a line rather than an extra. There are fish restaurants around the harbour, meze places in the lanes behind Uzun Çarşı, and a Friday market worth an hour. Standards are high for a town this size and prices sit well below the à la carte cost inside a large resort further east.

Who should skip Kaş

Families with small children who want sand and a shallow pool should go to Belek, Side or Ölüdeniz instead, and there is nothing wrong with that choice. Anyone set on all-inclusive: it barely exists here. Anyone with mobility limits: the town is steep, hotels have steps, and sea access is a ladder. Anyone who wants a short transfer. And anyone expecting a nightlife strip, because Kaş has bars, not a strip.

Getting a price

Send your dates, the number of adults and children, whether you want the centre, a bay or the peninsula, and roughly what you want to spend. A consultant checks live availability with our partner agencies, comes back with two or three options that genuinely fit, and you decide. The quote is free, no payment is taken on this website, and we normally reply within one working day.