Antalya Airport to Temple of Apollo Side transfer
The Temple of Apollo occupies the seaward point at the very end of Side's peninsula, where five Corinthian columns and a length of architrave were raised again out of the fallen blocks in the last century. Beside them lie the foundations of a second temple, and behind both the outline of a Byzantine basilica built across them. The old harbour is a few steps away on one side and open water on the other, so the columns stand almost in the sea. They are the image every photograph of Side uses, and at sunset they are the reason half the town walks out here.
From Antalya Airport it is 65 km and about 60 minutes: the D400 east through Aksu and Serik, past the turnings for Belek and Kadriye, then the peninsula road down into the town. What decides the visit is the last kilometre. In season the old quarter is closed to vehicles, so the car stops at the landward end of the peninsula and everything beyond that is on foot — ten to fifteen minutes on the flat to the point, longer if you stop, which everybody does. None of that is a hardship; it only means the visit has to be booked as a walk rather than as a drive.
Visiting Temple of Apollo Side
To reach it you walk the peninsula end to end, and the columns themselves take twenty minutes. The point is low and open, covered in broken stone and dry grass and roped off in places, and all you do is circle the temple and look at it from each side: from the harbour, from the seaward edge where the swell comes in, and from behind, where the basilica walls frame it. There is no route to follow and nothing to climb, so this is a stop of minutes attached to a walk of hours.
Its fame is the sunset, and the hour before it is when the point fills: come three quarters of an hour early if you want the columns with nobody in front of them, and stay twenty minutes after, when the light leaves the stone and the crowd thins. The other end of the day is emptier still — at eight in the morning the point can be yours alone, with the sun behind you rather than in your lens. What you should not do is come between noon and four: there is no shade anywhere on the point and the stone gives back the heat it has taken.
Because the temple is twenty minutes and the walk is an hour and a half, nobody should book a car for the columns alone. They are the far end of a Side evening: the theatre and the agora at the town gate, the colonnaded lanes, the harbour with its boats, then the point, then dinner somewhere along the water. In practical terms that means a drop-off in the late afternoon and a pickup agreed for after dark, rather than a driver sitting five hours at the edge of the old town. If you want a morning as well as the sunset, Manavgat is a short run inland to the north.
- The columns are twenty minutes; the walk out and back is all the rest of the visit.
- The point carries no shade at all and the broken stone radiates heat, so the middle of the day is the one time not to come.
- At sunset you will share the place with a crowd; three quarters of an hour earlier you will not.
- Once the sun is down the lanes back through the old town are lit but the ground on the point is not, so leave the uneven part before the light goes.