Antalya Airport to Red Tower Alanya transfer
The Red Tower — Kızıl Kule — is the octagonal brick keep on Alanya's harbour front, raised in the 1220s under Alaeddin Keykubad I to cover the anchorage and the dockyard below the castle rock. Five storeys of red brick stand on a stone base, with an open shaft and a cistern at the centre and stairs climbing inside the walls to a roof terrace that looks straight down on the boats. The floors have been given over to an ethnographic display. Of everything on this coast, it is the building where the climb is the visit.
From the airport it is 128 km and about 105 minutes, all of it on the D400: the plain past Serik, the Side and Manavgat turnings, then the long coastal run through Okurcalar, Avsallar and Konaklı with the mountains pressing closer as you go. What makes this trip different from the castle above it is the last kilometre — the tower is at sea level, so you come round to the harbour front instead of taking the hairpins up the rock. In July and August the slow stretch is the resort strip east of Manavgat, and after that the town's own harbour traffic.
Visiting Red Tower Alanya
You pay at the door and then you go up. The stairs run inside the walls, brick and stone, steep and uneven, with the light coming in through arrow slits and through the open shaft in the middle where the cistern sits; on some flights there is nothing worth calling a handrail. At the top there is a terrace with the harbour directly below, the castle rock standing over you, Cleopatra beach round the other side of the headland and the Taurus behind the town. Half an hour to forty-five minutes is the whole visit, the display on the floors included.
Brick holds heat, and by mid-afternoon in summer the inside of the tower is warmer than the quay outside, so the first hours after opening or the last before closing are worth choosing. The terrace is small: one coach party fills it, and you wait your turn at the parapet. Morning light falls on the castle rock and the walls above it, which is the photograph most people came for. Anyone who cannot manage steep stone steps will get very little from the ticket — and in that case the shipyard, a hundred metres along the shore, is the better half of the same visit and asks for no climbing at all.
Tower and shipyard together make about two hours on the harbour front, which is a car that waits — and if you have come the 128 km from the airport side, that is the arrangement to book. Add the castle on the hill and you have a half day, better served by a pickup fixed for a set hour. The order most people find easiest is the tower first while the stone is still cool, the shore walk to the shipyard after, then lunch on the quay; the castle, which is a separate drive, either before both or after them.
- The climb is the visit: steep, uneven stone steps inside the walls, and not much to hold on to in places.
- The roof terrace holds only a few people at a time, so a coach party arriving ahead of you costs ten minutes of waiting.
- Do it early or late in the day — the brick stores the afternoon heat and the inside gets warmer than the quay.
- The Seljuk shipyard is a hundred metres away along the shore under the castle rock and needs no climbing, which makes it the natural second half of the visit.