Antalya Airport → Mahmutlar Transfer

Mahmutlar lies east of Alanya on a narrow shelf between the highway and the sea, with the Taurus slopes rising steeply behind the last row of buildings. It grew out of a farming village into a dense town of apartment towers, and a large share of the people there are long-stay visitors and foreign residents, so the shops, cafés, clinics and estate agents are pitched at people who live there rather than at a one-week guest. The weekly street market is the fixture the week is planned around, and the promenade fills up in the evening rather than at midday.

At roughly 140 kilometres this is the longest routine run on the coast, about 115 minutes door to door. The D400 carries you east past Manavgat, Avsallar and Konaklı, then skirts Alanya itself, where the castle headland is hard to miss, before continuing along the eastern shore with the mountains pressing close to the road. Alanya is the variable: in August and over holiday weekends the town section can add a quarter of an hour. Late at night the whole route runs freely and the drive feels shorter than the distance suggests.