Lake Tuz
The Second Largest Lake In Turkiye, Hypersaline And Only One To Two Metres Deep; A Special Environmental Protection Area And A Major Flamingo Breeding Site · Sereflikochisar, Aksaray
Lake Tuz is the second largest lake in Turkiye and one of the strangest: it covers an enormous area of the central plateau and is almost nowhere more than a metre or two deep, so hypersaline that nothing much lives in it but algae and brine shrimp. Through the summer it evaporates back until much of the bed is a white salt crust you can walk out onto, and the shallow water that remains turns pink from the algae blooming in it - which is the photograph that has made the lake famous in the last decade. It supplies a large share of the country's salt from evaporation pans at its edges. It also holds one of the Mediterranean basin's biggest flamingo breeding colonies, and there the story turns: water extraction for irrigation and drought have dropped the lake badly, and in 2021 thousands of chicks died when it dried early. Both things are true at once, and the second is visible on the ground.
Tuz Golu, Sereflikochisar ve Eskil, Aksaray, Sereflikochisar, Aksaray, Turkiye
Open at all hours as open landscape; the commercial viewing and salt-walking areas beside the Ankara-Aksaray highway keep daytime hours and charge for parking. WHAT IS WALKABLE DEPENDS ENTIRELY ON THE SEASON - in spring the lake is shallow water, and by late summer much of it is dry salt crust. The flamingo colony area is protected and not open to visitors.