Side → Aspendos Transfer

Side to Aspendos private transfer

Side keeps its antiquity in pieces: a column among the souvenir shops, a gateway by the car park, the temple standing at the water's edge. Aspendos offers the opposite, one Roman theatre that has kept its full stage wall and its whole bowl of seating, largely because the Seljuks turned it into a caravanserai and went on repairing it long after the city emptied. Most guests go in the morning. The seats have almost no shade, the path up to the acropolis behind is open ground, and by midday the stone is handing back the heat. On certain late-summer evenings the theatre hosts opera and ballet, and then the outing turns round: leave Side towards dusk, come back after the final curtain.

The leg is 40 km and about 40 minutes. From Side the car takes the access road out to the D400 and turns west, towards Antalya, passing the junctions for Evrenseki, Çolaklı and Gündoğdu with the beach hotels on the left and flat farmland running inland on the right. Short of Serik the highway crosses the Köprüçay, and the turn for Aspendos follows that river north for a few kilometres to the village of Belkıs. Near the village an old Seljuk bridge humps over the water, and the theatre sits against the foot of its acropolis hill. A short drive beyond, out in the fields, the arches of the aqueduct run between two tall stone towers that once pushed the water across the plain under pressure.

• Ask for a pickup soon after breakfast, and bring a hat and water, so you are inside the theatre before the seating and the acropolis path take the full sun.
• The aqueduct towers stand a short drive past the theatre, too far for a midday walk, so mention them when booking and the waiting time and extra stop can be arranged.
• For a performance night, settle the return pickup point and an approximate time when you book, because the whole audience leaves the site at once when the show ends.
• To pair the trip with Side's own ruins, keep those for the late afternoon, when the old town on its peninsula is cooler than the inland plain around Aspendos.