Antalya Airport to DokumaPark Antalya transfer
Minicity Antalya is an open-air park of scale models: Turkey's best-known buildings and monuments rebuilt in miniature and set along winding paths through planted gardens, so that a country which takes weeks to cross can be walked across in an hour. The models are large enough to walk right around and small enough to look down on, which is the scale that works for children — they are usually the ones who recognise something first. The park stands in Konyaaltı, on the western side of Antalya, a short way inland from the beach and the boulevard that runs behind it.
The transfer covers 18 km and takes around 25 minutes, and the useful thing to know in advance is that the park is far shorter than the day it sits inside. The road runs west from the terminal, past the centre, then leaves the shore for the inland boulevards of Konyaaltı, and that is where the final minutes are spent: wide junctions, apartment blocks, a gate on a side street rather than a landmark on the seafront. Late afternoon is the pleasant hour to be driven out here, once the light has dropped and the gardens have lost the midday glare.
Visiting DokumaPark Antalya
An hour to two hours covers it, and that single fact decides the booking: this is a car that waits, not a drop-off with a pickup arranged for the evening. Children who stop to read every label take longer, a group of adults who walk it once takes less. The paths form a loop rather than a maze, so you come out where you went in and nobody has to be found again, which is why the driver at the gate never ends up waiting on a search party. Say at the time of booking that the car should stay, and the visit keeps its own pace.
Underfoot it is made paths and clipped grass, flat almost the whole way, with gentle slopes instead of steps — the easiest walking of any attraction on this side of Antalya, and one of the few where a wheelchair or a buggy is not a problem. What the site does not have is a roof. Planting shades parts of the route, but the models themselves stand in the open, since that is the only way to see and photograph them properly. The first hours of the day and the last before dark are therefore worth much more here than the middle.
Because an hour or two leaves most of a day unspent, hardly anyone comes out here for this alone. Konyaaltı beach is minutes away and will happily take an afternoon; Antalya's archaeological museum sits up at the eastern end of that same shore, and meeting the real carved stone after the small copies is a better order than the reverse. The water park and the aquarium are on this side of the city too. One car, two or three stops, with this gate as the short one — which is why it usually opens the day rather than closing it.
- Ask the children to find the places they have already seen for real; it turns a walk past models into a game and doubles the time you get out of the visit.
- Hats and water matter more than you would expect at a park you can cross in an hour, because there is nothing overhead for most of it.
- Pictures work better from low down than from standing height, so plan on crouching a great deal.
- Treat it as the short half of a longer outing: the park at the cool end of the day, the beach or the museum in the middle.