Tekirova

What Tekirova actually is

Tekirova is the southernmost resort village of the Kemer district, about twenty kilometres beyond Kemer town and the last place with large hotels before the coast road turns inland towards Çıralı and Olympos. It works as a holiday destination because of two things that happen to sit right next to each other: the water in front of it and the ruins beside it.

Take the water first. The Beydağları ridge comes down almost to the shoreline here, the shelf is narrow and steep, and virtually no river silt enters the sea between Kemer and Adrasan. The result is the clearest water on this part of the coast. On a calm morning in June you can stand on the pebbles and pick out individual stones four or five metres out, and the colour goes from turquoise to deep blue within thirty or forty metres of the beach. Divers and snorkellers rate Tekirova above every other Antalya resort for exactly this reason, and the boats that visit the Üç Adalar rocks just offshore leave from here rather than from Kemer marina.

Then the ruins. Phaselis, a Lycian and Roman port city laid out across a wooded peninsula with three separate harbours, is roughly three kilometres north of the village. You can be walking down a colonnaded Roman street twenty minutes after leaving your hotel and swimming off the ancient harbour beach half an hour after that. Very little of the Turkish Mediterranean puts a site of that quality that close to a hotel row.

The village itself is modest. One main street runs from the D400 coast road down towards the sea, with supermarkets, gift shops, a handful of restaurants, a mosque and a taxi rank, and almost everything else is hotel. What separates Tekirova from Beldibi, Göynük and Kemer town is the scale of those hotels. The land here was built out later and in much larger parcels, so several resorts occupy plots of ten hectares or more, with their own pine woods, internal buggy roads and, in two or three cases, a jetty running out over deep water. You can spend a week inside one and not run out of ground.

Tekirova suits people who have decided to stay put: families whose children already swim, couples who would rather have a hotel garden than a promenade, divers, snorkellers and anyone who values clear water over soft sand. It suits you much less if you want to walk out of the gate into a town. After about nine in the evening the village is quiet, and the nearest proper high street is a fifteen-minute drive north in Kemer.

Where to stay

The Phaselis end, north of the village

This is where the largest five-star garden resorts sit, strung along the coast between the village and the Phaselis peninsula. Mature gardens, long private beach sections, several pools each, and enough internal distance that a shuttle between the room block and the sea is not a joke. These are the hotels people mean when they say Tekirova, and they are why the price anchor here is the highest in the district.

The village strip

Four-star hotels and a smaller number of apart-hotels within walking distance of the shops and the public beach. Less garden, more convenience: you can buy your own water, sunscreen and fruit rather than paying boutique prices at the hotel gate, and there are independent restaurants along the street. A sensible compromise if you want all-inclusive without feeling sealed in.

The inland side of the coast road

A handful of cheaper properties sit above the D400 on the mountain side. Rates are lower and the mountain views are genuinely good, but you cross the road on foot to reach the sea and that road carries steady traffic all summer. Worth the saving if everyone in the party is mobile; not worth it with a pushchair.

Hotel stock and what a budget really buys

Tekirova is almost entirely four and five-star all-inclusive. There is very little bed and breakfast stock and almost no small pension trade, because the village never developed the independent restaurant row that would support it. What exists instead are big-plot resorts, most built or substantially rebuilt between the late 1990s and the 2010s, several run by the large Turkish hotel groups.

The indicative anchor for Tekirova starts at around 58 EUR per person per night. That is a shoulder-season figure for two people sharing a standard room on all-inclusive board in a good four-star, and it is the highest of the four Kemer-area villages. The reasons are structural rather than promotional: the plots are the biggest, the water is the best, the average star rating is higher and the five-star share of the stock is larger than at Beldibi or Göynük. Against that, Tekirova is the furthest of the four from Antalya Airport at around an hour, and there is nothing to walk to at night, which is what stops the figure climbing to Belek levels.

In July and August, expect that number to roughly double, and expect the genuinely large five-star gardens to sit well above the average even in shoulder season. If your budget is fixed and tight, Göynük or Beldibi will buy you a better room grade for the same money. You will simply be swimming in slightly less clear water and looking at a smaller garden.

Getting there

Tekirova is served by Antalya Airport (AYT), roughly 60 minutes away by road. The route runs around the bay past Antalya and Konyaaltı, climbs over a shoulder of the mountains, drops into Beldibi and then follows the coast south through Göynük, Kemer and Çamyuva before reaching the village. The last twenty-five minutes are the most winding part of it, so if anybody in the party is prone to travel sickness, put them in the front seat and skip the meal on the plane.

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, we track the flight so a delay does not cost you the car, and the price is quoted per vehicle rather than per person. On this route we pay particular attention to luggage volume when we allocate a vehicle, because the coast road is not the place to discover that the boot is too small.

Public transport exists but is slow: the airport bus into Antalya, then the Kemer dolmuş, then a second dolmuş down the coast, with luggage, in August heat. Very few people do that twice.

When to go

April. Daytime highs around 21 to 23 degrees, sea temperature near 18. Excellent for walking Phaselis and the Lycian Way sections above the coast, too cold for most people to swim. Many of the biggest hotels open mid-month.

May. Mid to upper twenties, the sea becoming properly swimmable in the second half of the month, gardens at their best after the winter rain and the hotels still quiet. One of the two best value windows of the year.

June. Around thirty degrees, warm clear water, long evenings. The strongest all-round month here, and the best one for snorkelling, because the water has warmed but the late-summer haze has not arrived.

July and August. Low to mid thirties on the coast. Tekirova runs a couple of degrees below the Antalya plain and is noticeably less humid, and the ridge takes the sun off the beach earlier in the afternoon than you would expect from the latitude. Prices peak, the big hotels run full and the boat trips are crowded.

September. The sea at its warmest, air in the high twenties, crowds thinning after the first week. For a lot of returning guests this is simply the month.

October. Mid to high twenties, the sea comfortable well into the month, the walking season reopening and prices falling steeply. The other genuine value window.

November to March. Most of the stock closes. A small number of hotels stay open, the mountains take snow, and the village goes back to being a village. Good for a quiet walking trip, wrong for a beach holiday.

The beach, the water and small children

Be clear about this before you commit. The beach is pebble, not sand: small to medium smooth stones, hot underfoot by midday and awkward on bare feet at the water's edge. The shelf drops away quickly, and in several places you are out of your depth within a few metres of the waterline. That combination is exactly what produces the clarity, and it is exactly what makes Tekirova a poor match for a two-year-old who wants to sit in ankle-deep water and dig.

Swim shoes are not optional here, they are the difference between enjoying the sea and complaining about it, and they cost very little in the village shops. Most hotels have solved the entry problem with a platform, a jetty or a set of steps into deeper water, and the larger resorts usually cover one section of beach with imported sand for exactly the toddler case. If you are travelling with a small child and Tekirova is the plan, that sand section is the single feature worth checking before anything else.

For swimmers, the reward is real. Visibility of fifteen to twenty metres is normal in June, there is rock and seagrass within easy snorkelling range of most hotel beaches, and the dive centres in the village run half-day boats to sites around Üç Adalar and to the drop-offs south of Phaselis.

Phaselis, Tahtalı and days out

Phaselis is the reason to set an alarm at least once. Three harbours, an aqueduct, a theatre among the pines and a main street running from one bay to the other, all inside a site you are allowed to swim from. Go at opening time, take water and something to swim in, and the north harbour is more or less yours before the coaches arrive from Kemer.

The lower station of the Olympos cable car is signposted off the coast road a few kilometres north of Tekirova, and the drive up to it takes about twenty minutes. The cabins climb to the summit of Tahtalı at 2,365 metres, where the air can be twenty degrees colder than the beach you left. Take a jacket even in August; on a clear morning the view runs from Antalya round to the Çıralı coast.

South of the village the road turns inland and then drops to Çıralı and Olympos, about forty minutes away, where a protected turtle beach, the Olympos ruins and the Yanartaş flames make an easy full day. Ulupınar, in a gorge on the way, is a cluster of trout restaurants built over cold spring water and can be ten degrees cooler than the coast on a July afternoon.

Closer to home, boat trips leave from the small harbour and from Kemer marina, and the Beydağları behind the village carry Lycian Way sections that can be walked as day stages without camping.

Evenings and food

This is where Tekirova asks something of you. The village has a genuine but short high street: Turkish restaurants doing grilled fish and meze at prices well below the hotel gate, two or three bars, supermarkets and the usual leather and jewellery shops. It is pleasant for an hour after dinner. It is not a night out.

If you want an evening with noise in it, Kemer town is fifteen minutes north by dolmuş or taxi, with a marina, a bazaar, a long promenade and most of the district's bars. Çamyuva, halfway between, has a small village centre with a handful of restaurants that many guests prefer to Kemer's. Most people staying in Tekirova make that trip once or twice a week and otherwise eat where they sleep, which is one reason all-inclusive dominates the local stock so completely.

Who should skip Tekirova

Parents of toddlers who want flat, soft, shallow sand should look at Side, Çolaklı or İncekum on the eastern side of Antalya. Anyone whose holiday depends on walking to a bar strip should be in Kemer town or Alanya. Golfers belong in Belek. If the group includes several people who get car-sick, the extra twenty-five minutes of winding road past Kemer is a real consideration, and Beldibi or Göynük deliver most of the same landscape with a shorter drive. And if you are on the tightest possible budget, this is the most expensive of the four Kemer villages, so your money works harder further north.

Getting a price

Send us your dates, how many adults and children are travelling, whether you want all-inclusive or half-board, and roughly what you are willing to spend. A consultant prices it with our partner agencies, who issue the booking and the voucher, and comes back with two or three options that actually match, including a note on what each hotel's beach is really like, whether it has a sand-covered section and how far the room blocks stand from the sea. The quote is free and non-binding, no payment is taken on this website, and we normally reply within one working day.