Tours in Belek

Belek was farmland and pine forest until the 1980s and is now the most purpose-built stretch of the Turkish coast: a line of large all-inclusive hotels behind a long sand beach, with more championship golf courses than anywhere else in the country. That is the point of the place. The courses sit in the pines between the hotels and the sea and stay playable through the winter, which is why the European tours come here in November. Behind the resort, the Taurus foothills rise quickly — the Kursunlu waterfall drops into a wooded gorge twenty minutes inland, and the Koprulu canyon further up is the rafting river. Aspendos, with its Roman theatre almost fully intact and still used for opera, is fifteen kilometres away, and the Land of Legends theme park sits at the western end of the strip.

What is booked from Belek is the strip's own economy plus what lies behind it. Theme park tickets with transfers, in daytime and night-show versions, are the family default. Buggy and quad safaris run up into the Taurus most mornings; the Green Canyon boat trip is the calmer version of the same day. Hammams and spa afternoons are a category here rather than an afterthought, since the hotels compete on them. And the airport transfer is the other constant, because Belek sits about forty minutes from Antalya airport and almost nobody arrives any other way.

Practical. Summer is hot and humid — 35C through July and August, with the sea near 28C — while the golf season runs at the other end of the year, October to May, when daytime sits in the high teens and low twenties. The resorts are self-contained and spread out, so a taxi or a transfer is needed for anything outside your own gate, and the beach is sand with a shelf that drops away quickly. Book buggy safaris and canyon trips for the morning, since afternoon heat and dust make them unpleasant. Tipping is around ten per cent even in all-inclusive hotels, where staff are on the same wages as everyone else, and lira in cash is the better currency for it.