Turkish Riviera

Bodrum is the modern name for Halicarnassus, the Carian capital where one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World once stood. The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus was built around 350 BC by Queen Artemisia for her husband Mausolus, and the monument was so famous that English took the word 'mausoleum' from it. A series of medieval earthquakes brought the structure down, and the Knights Hospitaller used the cut stone to build the castle that still sits over Bodrum's harbour today. The Turkish Riviera, also known as the Turquoise Coast, is the southwest corner of Turkey: around 1,000 kilometres of shoreline running from Antalya in the east to Bodrum in the west.

A Turkish charter is usually a gulet charter. The gulet is the traditional wooden two-masted yacht built in Bodrum, originally for sponge-diving and trade, and the modern leisure version was popularised by the writer Cevat Şakir, the so-called Fisherman of Halicarnassus, in the 1940s. Gulets are wide-decked and slow, made for shaded mezze lunches and afternoons at anchor in a quiet bay rather than for moving fast.

The Turkish Riviera has more sheltered bays than any other stretch of the eastern Mediterranean, which is why most of its charters combine swimming, archaeology and food in roughly equal measure. Most yachts anchor off Cleopatra's Beach at Sedir Island for the morning swim, and the route then runs through the sunken Lycian city of Kekova, where the ruins of an ancient town lie just below the water from a 2nd-century earthquake. From there, the gulet rounds the Ölüdeniz lagoon and works through Butterfly Valley, with the option to cross over to the Greek Dodecanese for a few days. Most Turkish charters pick up in Bodrum or Göcek, and the season runs April to November.