Ayder Plateau
Highland Summer Pasture At About 1,350 Metres In The Kackar Foothills, With Thermal Springs; Under A Long Running Programme To Remove Unauthorised Building · Camlihemsin, Rize
Ayder is a summer pasture at thirteen hundred metres in the foothills of the Kackar range, in the wettest corner of Turkiye, and for most of its history it was wooden houses, cattle, mist and a hot spring. Then it became famous. What followed was a building boom of concrete hotels squeezed onto a plateau that could not take them, and for years now a government programme has been demolishing the unauthorised ones and trying to put the place back - so at any given time Ayder is partly a mountain village, partly a resort and partly a building site. Go knowing that. What is still entirely intact is everything above it: the Firtina valley with its Ottoman arch bridges and Zilkale standing on a spur, the higher yaylas at Pokut and Sal where the wooden houses and the cloud are what people came for, and the Kackar mountains behind. The thermal bath is genuine, the rain is constant, and the region still delivers above.
Ayder Yaylasi, Camlihemsin, Rize, Camlihemsin, Rize, Turkiye
An inhabited plateau, open at all hours, with a road that is kept open most of the year and can close in heavy snow. Hotels and restaurants run year round with a heavy summer peak; the thermal bath complex keeps its own hours. The higher yaylas above are reachable roughly June to September only. A demolition and restoration programme has been running - check what is standing.