Olympos and the Chimaera

Lycian City And Protected Beach Inside Beydaglari Coastal National Park, With The Permanently Burning Methane Vents Of Yanartas Above Cirali · Kumluca, Antalya

Two things share a valley here and neither is quite what visitors expect. The first is Olympos, a Lycian and Roman city that nobody tidied up: the ruins lie under vines, figs and oleander along a stream, with a theatre half-buried in undergrowth, sarcophagi in the bushes and a Byzantine church appearing where the path bends, and the whole lot ends at a pebble beach that is protected as a turtle nesting site and therefore has nothing built on it. The second is a mile up the hillside above the neighbouring village of Cirali: Yanartas, where methane seeping out of the rock has been burning continuously for as long as anyone has recorded it, and where the ancients put a sanctuary of Hephaestus and the story of Bellerophon killing the fire-breathing Chimaera. You climb twenty or thirty minutes in the dark to find a hillside of small flames coming out of bare stone. It is as strange as it sounds.

Olympos Mahallesi, Olympos Oren Yeri, Kumluca, Kumluca, Antalya, Turkiye

The Olympos ruins are ticketed and keep daytime hours; the ticket has also covered beach access. Yanartas, the Chimaera, is ticketed separately and is open into the evening because the flames are best after dark - check the closing time before climbing up at dusk. Most treehouse pensions and restaurants run from about April to October.

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