Three days in Bodrum: a Wonder of the World in the castle walls, and a boat out every morning
Two nights on the Aegean, with the crusader castle and its shipwrecks, the site of the Mausoleum, a day on the water, and dinner on the marina.
- Length
- 3 days, 2 nights
- Where you stay
- Bodrum
- Places
- 7 across 3 days
Bodrum is two places sharing a name. One is a resort peninsula of package hotels, beach clubs and bar streets that fills up every July and empties every October. The other is the old town underneath it: Halikarnassos, where Herodotus was born, where a Persian governor built himself a tomb so extravagant that the word mausoleum comes from it, and where the Knights of St John spent most of a century building a castle on the harbour.
The tomb is gone. Earthquakes brought it down, and the Knights carted the marble away to strengthen their walls, so the Seven Wonder that survives best here is the one you can see mortared into the side of a fortress. The castle itself is excellent, and the museum inside it, built around a Bronze Age shipwreck lifted off the coast nearby, is one of the best in Turkey.
Two nights is the honest length for that, plus a day on the water, which is what people actually come for. The wooden gulets moored along the marina are built on this coast, and a day on one is cheap, slow and the best thing the town sells.
Highlights
- A crusader castle on the harbour with towers named after the four nations that argued over building it
- The cargo of a ship that sank here in the 14th century BC, laid out in one room: copper ingots, glass, ivory, gold
- The site of the Mausoleum, now a quiet garden of foundations, with the fragments that made it famous long gone
- A day on a wooden boat around the bay, swimming off the back of it, ending at an island cave spring
- Windmills on the ridge at sunset, with the castle lit up in one bay and the beach strip in the other
Where to stay
Bodrum, two nights
The town sits on a double bay with a rocky spur between the two halves. The castle is on the spur, the marina and the yachts fill the west bay, and the beach clubs and bar street take the east. Behind both, the old white houses climb a hill that the ancient city walls once ran over.
Stay in the old town rather than out on the peninsula. The distances look small on a map, but the buses take a while and the point of being here is walking down to the harbour for dinner.
Two nights is enough for the town itself and one full day on a boat. If you want beaches, the peninsula has a dozen bays with very different characters and needs several more days plus a car.
Day by day
Day 1 in Bodrum
The castle, a singer's house and the windmills at sunset
Give the afternoon to the castle. It takes longer than it looks: five towers, a chapel, a set of terraced gardens and a museum spread through all of it, and the shipwreck rooms are the reason to be unhurried.
Afterwards, walk up the hill behind the west bay to a small house museum with a very different flavour, which is worth half an hour for its costumes alone and for what it says about how this town used to work.
End on the ridge above the town for sunset, then come back down to eat by the water.
- 13:30
Bodrum Castle / Museum of Underwater Archaeology
HistoricThe Knights Hospitaller began the Castle of St Peter in 1402 and took most of a century over it, which is one reason its towers are named for the English, French, German and Italian contingents who each built their own. It held out against the Ottomans repeatedly and then surrendered to them in 1523. Since 1962 it has held the Museum of Underwater Archaeology, and the room to make time for holds the cargo of the Uluburun ship, which went down off this coast in the 14th century BC carrying copper, tin, glass ingots, ebony and a gold scarab.
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- 17:00
Zeki Müren Art Museum
VisitZeki Müren, who died in 1996, was the most flamboyant star in Turkish music, a classical singer in sequins and eyeliner who was loved by a country that was not otherwise relaxed about any of it. He retired to this house in Bodrum and it is now a museum of his stage costumes, of which there were a great many. Half an hour, and it will stay with you longer than that.
- 19:00
Windmills
VisitA row of squat stone windmills stands on the ridge between the town and the next bay west, on the path that was the old way over. They ground the peninsula's grain until well into the last century and are roofless now. The walk up takes twenty minutes and the view at sunset covers both bays at once.
- 20:30
Dinner on the harbour
EatFish by the kilo, meze first, and the boats you will be on tomorrow tied up in front of you. Confirm what the fish costs before it goes on the grill.
With more time: The town's old cemetery and the small neighbourhood mosque behind the east bay are five minutes apart and take ten minutes each, and they are a reminder that there was an Ottoman fishing town here for four hundred years between the Knights leaving and the hotels arriving.
Day 2 in Bodrum
A day on the water, and Kara Ada
The boats leave the marina between ten and eleven and come back around five, and buying a place on one is the simplest thing in Bodrum: walk the quay the evening before, look at the boats rather than the signs, and pick one that is not full.
The standard run crosses the bay, stops three or four times to swim, feeds you lunch on deck and calls at the island off the south side of the harbour. The water is clear enough to see the anchor chain on the bottom.
Take more sun cream than you think, because there is no shade off the stern, and cash for drinks. It is a slow day and the slowness is the point.
- 10:30
Kara Ada
NatureBlack Island, the wooded lump sitting across the mouth of the bay, and the usual last stop of the day. There is a hot spring in a cave on the north shore where people coat themselves in the ochre coloured mud and then rinse it off in the sea, on the theory that it is good for the skin. Nobody has proved that and everybody does it. The swimming off the rocks is the better reason to stop.
- 13:00
Lunch on deck
EatIncluded on almost every boat and much the same on all of them: grilled chicken or fish, rice, salad, bread, fruit. Drinks are extra and cash only on most of the older boats.
With more time: If a group boat is not the idea, the same quay charters small ones by the half day, and the west coast villages of the peninsula are a bus ride away for a beach afternoon instead. The bay at the far western tip is the one people rate for swimming and for watching the sun go down over the water.
Day 3 in Bodrum
Halikarnassos: the Mausoleum site, the theatre and the Myndos Gate
The last morning is the ancient city, which takes about two hours and is a short walk uphill from the harbour. Go early, before the heat.
Expect foundations rather than monuments. The Mausoleum is a rectangle in the ground with a few column drums stacked beside it, and the best surviving sculpture from it left for the British Museum in the 1850s. What the site gives you instead is the scale of the thing and a very quiet garden in the middle of a loud town.
The theatre above the ring road and the city gate at the western end are both free, both in the open air, and both quick. Then it is a transfer to the airport.
- 09:00
Mausoleum of Halikarnassos
HistoricMausolos ruled Caria for the Persians from this city and commissioned a tomb about forty five metres high, finished after his death in 353 BC by his sister and widow Artemisia, and counted ever after as one of the Seven Wonders. Earthquakes had wrecked it by the end of the 15th century and the Knights used the stone for their castle, which is where a good deal of it still is. The site today is foundations, a garden and a small display, and it is worth the hour for what it explains.
- 10:15
Bodrum Amphitheatre
HistoricCut into the hillside above the modern road, begun under Mausolos in the 4th century BC and rebuilt by the Romans in the 2nd century AD. Restoration in the 1970s and 1990s turned it back into a working venue seating around ten thousand, so in summer you may find a stage in it. Free, open, and the view down over both bays is the best in town after the windmills.
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- 11:30
Myndos Gate
HistoricThe western gate of the ancient city walls, with the rock cut ditch in front of it still visible, and one of the points Alexander's army attacked during the siege of Halikarnassos in 334 BC. Two towers and a stretch of wall survive. It is fifteen minutes and it is the only place in Bodrum where the ancient city feels like a city rather than a plan.
- 13:00
Transfer to the airport
TravelAbout forty minutes by road, and the bus is not to be relied on. Book the hotel transfer or a taxi the night before, and allow extra in August when the coast road backs up.
With more time: With a later flight, the hilltop ruins of the Carian settlement that stood here before Halikarnassos are half an hour inland by taxi, with walls, a tomb and a view over the whole peninsula. There is no shade and no ticket office.
Before you go
Getting there
Milas Bodrum airport is about forty minutes northeast of town. The domestic terminal has flights all year from both Istanbul airports; the international one is busy with European charters from May to October and nearly dead the rest of the year. Public transport from the airport is unreliable, and the taxi drivers know it, so book a transfer with your hotel or hire a car.
Buses reach everywhere: Izmir hourly and about four hours, Istanbul eleven hours overnight, Ankara ten, Antalya seven. They arrive at the terminal on the edge of town, from which local buses run into the centre every couple of minutes.
The ferry to Kos takes well under an hour and runs most of the year, which makes Bodrum a sensible place to start or end a trip that includes the Greek islands. Take your passport and check the return times before you go.
Getting around
The old town is small. The castle, the marina, the Mausoleum site and the theatre are all within twenty minutes of each other on foot, with one hill in the middle of it.
Everything else on the peninsula is served by numbered buses from the intercity terminal, running every ten to twenty minutes in season to the beach villages on both coasts, plus a swarm of dolmuş minibuses that go where the buses do not.
A hire car is worth it if you want the far end of the peninsula, and a nuisance in the middle of town in August, when parking is a competitive sport.
When to come
June and September are the best months: hot, swimmable, and without the July and August crush that doubles the room rates and fills the roads.
In winter a lot of the town closes. The castle stays open, the peninsula is green and quiet and cheap, and the boats mostly do not run, which removes a third of the reason to be here.
Whenever you come, the meltem wind blows through the afternoons in summer. It is why the sailing is good and why the beach umbrellas keep leaving.
Eating and drinking
The marina front is where you pay for the view, and some of it is worth paying for. The better value is a street or two back, where the meze are the same and the fish is priced by the kilo before it is cooked. Ask the price first, always.
Local things to look for: octopus, which the Aegean does better than the Mediterranean coast, sea bass baked in salt, and the mandarin, which grows all over the peninsula and turns up in everything from salads to spirits.
The bar street behind the east bay is loud until four in the morning in season. Choose your hotel with that in mind, or embrace it.
Bodrum has a reputation for cheap package holidays and it earns a good deal of it. The strip along the east bay is not why anybody would fly.
The castle is. A Bronze Age wreck laid out room by room, a fortress built out of a Wonder of the World, and a wooden boat leaving the quay every morning add up to a better two nights than the town's reputation suggests.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is there anything left of the Mausoleum?
- The foundations, the burial chamber, some column drums and a scatter of carved blocks. The famous friezes and the colossal statues went to the British Museum in the 1850s, and much of the rest of the marble is in the walls of the castle down the hill. Go for the story and the quiet, not for the ruins.
- Is Bodrum too touristy?
- The peninsula largely is, and in August the whole of it is. The old town around the castle is a working Turkish town underneath the bars, and out of high season it feels like one. If crowds are the worry, come in June or late September and stay in the old town rather than at a resort.
- Which boat trip should I take?
- The standard bay tour with swimming stops and lunch, sold along the marina, is good value and much the same whichever boat you pick. Walk the quay the day before and choose by the boat, not the poster. Private charters cost several times as much and are worth it for a group.
- Can I get to Greece from here?
- Yes. Kos is under an hour by ferry and runs most of the year, and there are onward boats and flights from there into the rest of the Dodecanese. Take your passport, check the last return of the day, and note that services thin right out in winter.
- Is two nights enough?
- For the castle, a boat day and the ancient city, yes. Add nights if you want beaches: the peninsula has a dozen bays with very different characters, from the windsurfing on the south coast to the quieter villages at the western tip, and seeing them properly needs a car and several days.