Antalya
You can be here in December for about €554, 4 days, direct.
Why now
Good time in December: 17°C days, sea 21°C.
The shoulder months either side of summer are when the coast makes sense: the sea is warm, the Lycian Way is walkable and the package hotels are half empty. Peak summer is hot enough that ruins are best seen before nine and after five.
Best months here: May, October, November. December is not one of them — the label above measures the month against a fixed bar, not against the rest of the year here. Daytime highs, sea temperature and rainy days from three years of Open-Meteo reanalysis; a rainy day is one with at least 1 mm of rain, which is the WMO threshold and not the same as "it drizzled".
The place
Antalya is a working city of over a million people with a walled Ottoman old town, Kaleiçi, dropped on a cliff above a Roman harbour; the resort strips are elsewhere, in Lara and Belek and Side. The Lycian coast to the west is the real reason to come: ruins in pine forest, a coastal footpath and small bays reached by boat or gulet. It suits people who want beaches with a museum and a hike attached.
What you can do
- 01Walk Kaleiçi's lanes to Hadrian's Gate and the Hıdırlık Tower, then swim below the cliffs at Mermerli.
- 02See the Antalya Museum's Perge sculptures, then the actual stadium and colonnaded street at Perge, half an hour east.
- 03Sit in the top rows of the Roman theatre at Aspendos, still nearly intact, mid-morning before the heat.
- 04Take a boat from Kaş or Üçağız over the sunken city at Kekova and swim near Simena's castle.
- 05Hike a marked stretch of the Lycian Way from Olympos toward the Chimaera flames in the early morning.
Where to stay · neighbourhoods
Stay in a Kaleiçi pension for the city, then move west to Kaş or Çıralı for the coast; the all-inclusive belts at Belek and Lara are fine for pools and little else.
Unusual things
- ◦Termessos, a Pisidian city Alexander never took, spread across a mountainside in the Güllük Dağı national park, with a theatre facing a gorge.
- ◦The Chimaera at Yanartaş, natural gas flames that have burned on the hillside above Çıralı since antiquity, best visited after dark.
- ◦Patara, an eighteen-kilometre dune beach with a Lycian parliament building and lighthouse rebuilt in the ruins behind it.
Day trips
Flight options
Routes come from OpenFlights (historical) and a 2026 route reference compiled from public timetables. Durations are the published schedule where we have it, otherwise a block-time model fitted on measured nonstop flights. Verify schedules with the airline before booking.
Entry requirements · IT passport
Türkiye: visa-free up to 90 days in 180 for most EU passports.
Source: passport-index-data, March 2026 (coarse indicator), covering 258 of our 268 destinations for each of 199 passports. Always confirm with the destination's official site.
Airports
Distances are centre to airport derived · nonstop counts are our route reference for 2026, not every flight that exists.
Local transport
- Airport to city
- Tram, 45 min, ~€1; car for the coast
- Car needed?
- Recommended for most of what is worth seeing
- Getting around
- The AntRay tram links the airport, the centre and Konyaaltı; dolmuş minibuses run the coast road cheaply but slowly. A hire car is the honest answer for Lycia, since the good sites are scattered and the buses stop early.
- Clock
- 2 hours ahead of Amsterdam (Europe/Istanbul) derived
- Daylight
- 9.7 hours of daylight in December · sunrise 08:03, sunset 17:42 derived
- Currency
- TRY
Alternatives at a similar price
Whole trip per person for 4 days from Amsterdam in December, then the flight time; estimates, like the total above.
Hurghada
Sharm El Sheikh
Cairo
Tenerife
Luxor
Agadir