Antalya Beyond the Beach: Hadrian’s Gate, Kaleiçi and the Ancient Harbour

Most people who land in Antalya are bound for a sunbed. The airport coaches peel off towards Lara and Konyaaltı, the all-inclusive wristbands go on, and the old city on the cliff above the harbour is, at best, an evening's stroll. That is a pity, because Antalya is one of the great layered cities of the Mediterranean: Hellenistic by birth, Roman by ambition, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman by turns, and still very much a working, noisy, modern Turkish city.

I spent two days there in 2025 doing almost nothing but walking: through Hadrian's Gate, around the walls of Kaleiçi, down to the old harbour, into a necropolis that turned up under a building site, and out to the Düden waterfalls. This is the guide I would have wanted before I went. Here is the film:

A city named after a king

Antalya began life as Attaleia, founded around 150 BC by Attalus II of Pergamon as a base for his fleet, and named, with no false modesty, after himself. His bronze statue stands near Kalekapısı, at the threshold of the old town. He is a useful corrective to the idea that everyone in the ancient world died young: born in 220 BC, he became king in his early sixties and reigned until his death at around 82.

Rome followed soon enough. Attalus III left the kingdom of Pergamon to Rome on his death in 133 BC; after a spell in which the coast was a nest of pirates, the city was brought into the Roman fold in 77 BC. Under the Byzantines Attaleia was a bishopric and a key naval station. The Seljuk sultan Kaykhusraw I took it in 1207, lost it to a Christian revolt in 1212, and his successor Kaykaus I took it back for good in 1216. The Ottomans arrived in 1391, and after the First World War the city spent three years under Italian occupation before returning to Turkish rule during the War of Independence. Each new master built on the last, often literally.

Hadrian's Gate: the doorway that outlived Rome

Hadrian's Gate, Üçkapılar to the locals (the three gates), between its two towers.

This was the monument I most wanted to see, and I came across it first by accident, in the evening, before going back in daylight. It was built in honour of the emperor Hadrian, who visited the city in AD 130: three arches of white marble on granite pillars, carved with floral and rosette reliefs. The gate was originally two storeys high, and the upper level, now lost, is thought to have carried statues of the emperor and his family.

The towers either side tell their own story. The southern one, known as the Julia Sancta tower, is Roman. The lower part of the northern tower is Roman too, but its upper section was rebuilt in the 13th century under the Seljuk sultan Alaeddin Keykubad I and carries an inscription in Arabic script. Layer upon layer of empire, in stone you can touch.

Oddly, the gate's survival owes a great deal to being forgotten. It was absorbed into the city walls and went unused for centuries, which probably spared it. The British naval officer Francis Beaufort recorded it in 1817, but it was only properly revealed when the walls around it came down in the 1950s, and it was restored in 1959. A dozen bronze letters from the dedication to Hadrian were found at its foot; they are now scattered among museums and collections, including the British Museum in London and the Ashmolean in Oxford.

Ruts worn into the Roman paving by centuries of carts passing in and out of the city.

Look down as you pass through. The modern street sits well above the Roman one, which tells you how much the city has risen over 1,900 years (London is the same). Through the main arch you can see the original paving, scored with deep grooves worn by cart wheels. What surprised me is how open it all is: you simply walk through a monument almost two thousand years old. I loved that, and I also worried about it. I hope it stays that way, and I hope it stays protected from the idiots with chisels.

Inside the walls: Kaleiçi

Kaleiçi means, more or less, 'inside the castle', and it is the original core of the city: a horseshoe of lanes enclosed by a double ring of walls, running downhill to the harbour. The walls were first raised in antiquity and strengthened by everyone who came after; the old town within holds around 3,000 traditional houses with red-tiled roofs, many now boutique hotels, bars and restaurants.

A Kaleiçi street on a bright morning, with a minaret rising at the end of the lane.

The bazaar quarter around Kalekapısı is where the city still trades. I am not much of a shopper, but I found myself wandering it anyway: ice creams, watermelons, football shirts, handbags, kebabs, a stall selling vacuum cleaners, queues of people at the scratch-card sellers. I bought six pairs of socks. A spice merchant pressed a cup of his 'salt tea' on me, a sinus-clearing brew of a dozen or so spices that tasted like a eucalyptus inhaler in a teacup. On Friday the call to prayer rolls across the rooftops and the crowds spill out of the mosques into the street; five minutes later you can be sitting with a cold beer by the marina. That balance is Antalya.

The Yivli Minare: Antalya's symbol

The fluted Yivli Minare, the city's best-known landmark.

The fluted brick minaret of the Yivli Minare Mosque, about 38 metres high, is the image on half the postcards in town. After the Seljuk conquest a mosque was built on the site of a ruined Byzantine church, and the minaret was most likely commissioned under Alaeddin Keykubad I, who reigned from 1220 to 1237. Look closely and you can still see traces of the turquoise and dark-blue tiles that once covered it. The mosque beside it was rebuilt in 1373 under the Hamidid ruler Mehmet Bey, and for a time in the 20th century it even housed the Antalya Museum. A few lanes away, the Kesik Minare, the 'broken minaret', stands beside the remains of what was once a Christian church: the city's history is rarely more than a street apart.

The ancient harbour and Hıdırlık Tower

The old harbour beneath Kaleiçi, now a marina for tour boats and yachts.

The harbour that Attalus founded the city for is still there beneath the cliffs, now a marina full of tour boats, yachts and fishing boats. Two thousand years ago these waters carried Roman grain ships; later Byzantine fleets patrolled them against Arab raiders. Parts of the ancient breakwater survive. It is a beautiful place to walk, with the Taurus Mountains rising across the bay.

A word of advice: when I glanced at the menus around the harbour, prices were two to three times what I found a couple of blocks back. Unless the restaurant is exceptional, walk up into the side streets. That is where I had a beer and an Adana kebab for a fraction of the harbour price.

Hıdırlık Tower, where the land walls once met the sea walls.

At the southern end of Kaleiçi, where it meets Karaalioğlu Park, stands Hıdırlık Tower: a 14-metre round tower on a square base, thought to have been built by the Romans in the 2nd century AD and used since as a fort and a lighthouse. Not far away, in Yavuz Özcan Park close to the sea, an equestrian statue of Kaykhusraw I, the first Turkish conqueror of the city, points out to sea. However you feel about conquest, the view from that stretch of cliff, over the old town and the mountains, is one of the best in Turkey.

The Friday market

If you are in town on a Friday, find the open-air market. Mountains of tomatoes, carrots, onions, peppers, grapes and watermelons, fresh honey and fresh fish, all of it so vivid it looks retouched. Compared with the market I filmed in Paris, which was crowded and littered and where I was told again and again to put my camera away, this was clean, calm and civil. Nobody minded the camera; everybody was friendly. The farmers sell directly to the people who eat their food, and the Mediterranean diet here is not a fad but simply lunch. It is the kind of market that reminds you what we have lost to the supermarket.

The Necropolis Museum: a cemetery under a building site

In 2008 the city began building a business centre and car park on the site of an old bus station and market, known as Doğu Garajı. As the ground was dug out, graves appeared: this was the eastern necropolis of ancient Attaleia. Rescue excavations between 2008 and 2010 uncovered around 866 graves, according to the Turkish culture ministry, along with more than a thousand catalogued finds and the remains of nearly 2,000 people. The cemetery was in use from the late 4th century BC well into the Roman period, and the site is now Antalya's Necropolis Museum, billed as Turkey's first.

You walk on raised walkways above the graves, which range from simple pits cut into the bedrock to chamber tombs. One chamber tomb held twelve skeletons. There are sarcophagi and tombstones, including a Greek inscription bearing my own name, Alexander, and one memorable epitaph lamenting that life is so miserable that death has become humanity's most desirable refuge. Families buried their dead with clay oil lamps; inside the museum there is also a surprisingly good display on sport in the ancient world, from wrestlers and boxers to limestone weights that were the Roman equivalent of dumbbells.

It is a fascinating place, and it deserves better management. When I visited, it was all but empty. The card machine at the entrance took an age to work. Part of the site sits outside the roof and open to the weather, and the pigeons have made themselves very much at home. Archaeologists saved this site from the bulldozers once; I hope whoever is in charge at City Hall keeps it saved, and puts it in front of far more visitors.

Barbers, a hamam and a Turkish coffee

Away from the stones, Antalya is a fine place to be looked after. I went slightly off the beaten track for a Turkish coffee and simit, the sesame-crusted Ottoman cousin of the bagel, at a little bakery popular with locals. I had a Turkish barber's shave and trim, with the full ritual of hot towels, a massage and every stray ear and nostril hair dealt with, which at €50 left me fairly sure they had seen me coming. And I spent an evening in a hamam, scrubbed, steamed and massaged, then left with a face mask of mud to wash off myself. Worth it all the same.

Beyond the walls: the tram, the museum and the Düden waterfalls

Antalya is a very large city, and its old-fashioned heritage tram along the coast road is the easy way to cover ground. When I rode it I simply tapped a contactless bank card at the door. The line runs out towards the Antalya Museum, which was the one place I had come to Antalya for, and I arrived to find it shut. It has since been closed for demolition and rebuilding, from July 2025, after a seismic assessment found the building at risk, with its collection held in storage. Check the latest before you plan a day around it. If you do turn up at a closed site, expect a taxi driver to offer you a tour of the sights at a price.

The Düden waterfall, a green pocket in the middle of the city's sprawl.

I took a taxi of 20 minutes or so out to the Upper Düden Waterfall, where the Düden River reappears from the limestone after vanishing underground some 18 kilometres away. It sits in a fenced park with a small entry fee (70 lira when I went in 2025). You can walk through caves behind the falls, where the stones have been polished smooth by countless feet, so mind your footing, and look up for the bats roosting a few feet above the crowds. Outside the gates there are pony rides and even camel rides. It is, frankly, a theme park built around a waterfall in the middle of urban sprawl, but I am glad it was saved. For the trip back, the bus took about as long as a taxi would have, for a fraction of the price.

My verdict

I was genuinely impressed by Antalya. It felt safe: no hassle, no menace, just people going about their business, and it was well policed. A retired police officer who drove me in a taxi made me reflect that the Metropolitan Police could learn a thing or two. The food was outstanding, from the seafood and grills to the simplest salad, and the people were nothing but hospitable.

Two days was not enough. I never made it to Perge, the mountains or the other ancient cities around Antalya. From here I flew east to the far older world of Göbekli Tepe and the Taş Tepeler sites, which you can read about in my Taş Tepeler visitor's guide.

Stay connected and pay like a local

Sort your data before you fly, because you will want maps, the tram and your banking app working the moment you land. I recommend Roamless for an eSIM you can set up at home. Use code WONDERING for 20% off.

The Turkish lira has lost a great deal of value in recent years, so prices move quickly and exchange rates vary widely from one bureau to the next. Before you change money, compare bureaux near you with Money Maps, which shows rates on a map and what you actually get after fees. It is free on the App Store.

Where to stay in Antalya

For atmosphere, stay inside the walls in Kaleiçi, where many of the old houses are now small hotels within walking distance of Hadrian's Gate and the harbour. For the beach, look at Konyaaltı or Lara. Use the map below to compare places to stay, or browse hotels on Booking.com and Airbnb:

Things to do in Antalya

Walking tours of Kaleiçi, boat trips from the old harbour and day trips to Perge, Aspendos and the waterfalls are all easy to book. See tours and things to do in Antalya on Viator:

Plan your trip

• Hotels: Booking.com

• Apartments: Airbnb

• Tours and activities: Viator Antalya

• Car hire: Discover Cars

• Private airport transfer: GetTransfer

• eSIM: Roamless (code WONDERING for 20% off)

• Currency: Money Maps (free on the App Store)

Flights

Compare fares to Antalya below.

Frequently asked questions

How long do you need in Antalya's old town?

Two days lets you see Hadrian's Gate, Kaleiçi, the harbour, the Necropolis Museum and one trip out of the centre, such as the Düden waterfall. Add more time for Perge, Aspendos or the mountains.

Can you walk through Hadrian's Gate?

When I visited, yes. The gate stands in the open at the edge of Kaleiçi and you can walk straight through it, over the Roman paving and its cart-wheel grooves.

Is the Antalya Museum open?

The Antalya Museum closed in July 2025 for demolition and rebuilding, with its collection in storage. Check the latest before you go.

Is Antalya worth visiting for history rather than the beach?

Very much so. Between the Roman gate, the Seljuk minaret, the walls, the harbour and the necropolis, the old town alone repays a long weekend.

Sources: what I saw and filmed in Antalya in 2025, my Antalya film on YouTube, Wikipedia's articles on Antalya, Kaleiçi, Hadrian's Gate, the Yivli Minaret, Hıdırlık Tower, the Antalya Museum and the Düden Waterfalls, and the Turkish culture ministry's information on the Antalya Necropolis Museum. Opening times, fees and prices change, so check before you go.

Photos: Hadrian's Gate and two towers by Sharon Hahn Darlin (CC BY 2.0); Hadrian's Gate walkway grooves by Joe Wallace (CC BY-SA 2.0); Kaleiçi street and minaret by Sharon Hahn Darlin (CC BY 2.0); Yivli Minare Mosque by Bernard Gagnon (CC BY-SA 3.0); Kaleiçi harbour by REHBER0770 (CC BY-SA 4.0); Hıdırlık Tower by Bernard Gagnon (CC BY-SA 3.0); Düden Waterfall by zolakoma (CC BY 2.0); all via Wikimedia Commons.

Disclosure: this post contains affiliate links, so I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

If useful, subscribe to my YouTube Channel. Or SubscribeStar. Or buy me a coffee via Ko-Fi.

Safe travels, The Wondering Englishman