Antalya Airport to Alanya Castle transfer
Alanya Castle spreads over the whole headland the town is built against. Seljuk walls raised in the 13th century under Alaeddin Keykubad I run for kilometres over a rock that falls straight into the sea, enclosing the inner citadel, a Byzantine church, cisterns and Ehmedek, a quarter where people still live. Down at sea level the octagonal Red Tower guards the harbour, and beside it the vaulted Seljuk shipyard is cut into the cliff. The castle road climbs just over three kilometres of narrow hairpins, and a cable car from the Cleopatra beach end reaches the same hill.
If you are staying in Alanya this is your own hill: about 15 minutes up from the centre or Cleopatra beach, 20 from Konaklı, around 25 from Mahmutlar, half an hour from Avsallar and 35 to 40 from Okurcalar. From Side or Manavgat it is an hour to an hour and a quarter east on the D400, and the standard full day out of the Side hotels. Belek is an hour and a half each way, Antalya and Lara two hours, Kemer three — at that distance take Phaselis instead. A coach gives the summit 45 minutes and the harbour a photo stop; your own car does both, in the order you choose.
From the airport the castle is 129 km, about 105 minutes. Driving there straight from arrivals only makes sense if the hotel is in Alanya anyway, and even then the hill means worn paving and slopes at the end of an hour and three quarters in the car. As a break on the transfer east it works far better than as a day trip out of Antalya, which costs four hours of driving for a half-day visit.
Visiting Alanya Castle
The first thing to settle is whether you are walking up. From the harbour to the summit is a long pull in the open on a road built for cars, and the people who take it on by accident arrive too hot to care about what they came for; being driven to the top turns the same visit into level strolling. Once you are up there everything sits close together: the inner citadel with the sea on three sides of it, a small mosque with a worn courtyard, a cistern deep enough that you feel the cool of it from the doorway, and the lanes of Ehmedek, where the houses are lived in and washing hangs between old walls.
Work outward from the top: the citadel first while the light is still low, then the wall walks, then down through the quarter. An hour and a half covers it without hurrying, two if you stop where the view deserves it. The upper ground is uneven in its own way — steps of different heights, unrailed edges above a long drop, and loose grit on the slopes between terraces — and the shade comes from walls and from fig trees in the lanes rather than from anything above you. Morning is plainly the hour: the rock holds the afternoon heat, and the summit is where the coaches go after lunch.
The standard arrangement is a car that waits at the top for a couple of hours and then takes you down to the Red Tower and the shipyard, which are a separate short visit at sea level. The better one, if the day is not too hot, goes one way only: be driven to the summit, walk down through the quarter and the old lanes to the harbour, and have the car meet you at the tower. Downhill in shade beats uphill in sun, it puts the waterfront at the end instead of the middle, and if you then stay to eat, the pickup is already where you are.
- With an hour, stay in the inner citadel and on the wall beside it, and let the rest of the hill go.
- A carrier beats a pushchair here: the lanes are steps and ramps of worn stone with no smooth line through them.
- Long stretches of wall have no railing and a great deal of air below them, which counts for more with children than the climbing does.
- Ehmedek is somebody's street as much as it is a monument, so keep voices and cameras lower there than up at the citadel.