Kemer - A beautiful but crowdet holiday resort

Monday, 09 December 2013 17:19
Written by Portal Editor

Kemer - 30 miles to the west of Antalya at the base of the Bey Mountains, which belong to the Olympos National Park.

Kemer is situated as one of the most beautiful holiday resorts with a beautiful harbour for sailing ships directly at the seaside.

Small and beautifully-decorated shops offer a wide variety of different goods.

North towards the yacht harbour, a picturesque promenade with lots of beautiful coffee shops and restaurants is being built. At Yörük Park, people can watch the living conditions of Yürük people travelling with their sheep and goat for doing their daily jobs. It is a lifelike exhibition of peoples work in the Taurus mountains, which is still being continued until today.

On both sides of Kemer, a lot of holiday accommodations are available with well equipped sports, leisure and entertainment facilities for everyone. Since a couple of years ago, Kemer has been famous as one of the places for a big event in car racing: The Rallye of Turkey, which is part of the WRC world championship in rallye sports with its famous drivers and cars, takes place in the Taurus Mountains at Kemer.

During the last years, the town was mostly visited by Russian tourists, which is, since the crisis between Russia and Turkey, a big problem for the local business.

A Brief History of the Seaside Resort of Kemer

In antiquity, the site was known as Idyros and was situated slightly southwest of the modern town centre, as well as north of the important trading city of Phaselis.

Around 1910, Kemer was still called Eski Köy (meaning "the Old Village") and was surrounded by a marshy landscape dotted with lakes formed by mountain meltwater. To protect themselves from flooding, the inhabitants at the time constructed a 23-kilometer-long stone wall along the foothills of the mountains. Because of this wall, Eski Köy was renamed Kemer (meaning "Arch" or "Belt").

Until the 1960s, Kemer was accessible only by sea. After 1980, Kemer was connected by a road and received substantial funding from a UN organization, enabling its transformation from a traditional fishing village into a small town focused exclusively on tourism.

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