Antalya Airport to Sorgun Beach transfer
Sorgun Beach is the stretch of sand east of Side where the umbrella pines run almost to the waterline. The forest is what sets it apart: shade a few steps behind the loungers, cooler air in the afternoon and a shoreline that never looks built up, even in August. Most of the frontage belongs to large hotels, each with its own section, its own beds and its own way down to the sea; the bottom shelves slowly and the water is usually calmer than on the open coast west of Side. Between those sections, public paths lead down to the same sand.
From Side itself this is a ten-to-fifteen-minute hop, longer than the map suggests because the old town has to be driven around, and from Titreyengöl it is much the same; from Kumköy, Manavgat or Çolaklı reckon fifteen to twenty minutes. Belek makes a morning of it — just under 50 km, about 45 minutes — usually paired with the Side ruins on the way back. From Alanya or Kemer it is not worth the road, and Alanya has its own pine-backed sand at İncekum. A car drops you at the access path and comes back later, instead of circling these lanes for one of the few parking spaces.
From the airport it is 70 km and about 65 minutes. Coming straight here on arrival makes sense only if a Sorgun hotel is where you are checking in. As a first stop before a hotel elsewhere it is awkward: there is nowhere to leave luggage, and the public paths open onto plain sand. Easier to check in first and come back on a hot afternoon, when the pines are doing their work.
Visiting Sorgun Beach
Sorgun is an afternoon rather than a morning, which is the reverse of most of this coast. From about three the air behind the sand is cooler than the air in front of it, the light comes low through the trunks, and the walk in from the lane is shaded the whole way. Three or four hours is the usual stay, spent going back and forth between the water and the trees, which is not a thing you can do on an open strip. Nobody sightsees here. The visit is the sand, the pines and a long swim, and that is the whole of it.
The sand is fine and the bottom goes out so slowly that you wade and wade before it reaches your chest, so this is a shore for standing in the water rather than for diving into it. Behind the sand the ground is dry needle litter, soft to sit on and noticeably cooler than the open sand two steps away, and it is where day visitors end up for the middle hours. The public paths between the hotel sections come out onto plain sand with nothing laid out on it, so whatever you want to lie on arrives with you.
Set against the long strip west of the headland, this is a short visit and a cheap one to keep a car for: three hours under the trees does not overrun the way a whole day on open sand does, and you leave when the shade stops being a novelty. Better still, make it the second half of something — ruins or the market town inland in the morning, pines in the afternoon — and one car covers the day. What the driver needs is the name of the access path rather than the name of the beach, because from the road every gap in the pines looks like the same gap.
- Aim for the afternoon rather than the morning, because the shade behind the sand is the whole point of coming here.
- The bottom shelves so gently that swimming properly means a long wade first, which is what makes it easy on small children.
- The needle floor behind the beach is where the middle hours are comfortably spent, so a mat is worth more than a parasol.
- Tell the driver which access path between the hotel sections you used, because they are hard to tell apart from the road.