Üçağız named a “Best Tourism Village 2025” — so what is the village actually like?

The village of Kale (Üçağız), in the Demre district of Antalya province, has been given an award under the UN World Tourism Organization’s “Best Tourism Villages 2025” programme. The ceremony was held on 17 October 2025 in Huzhou, in China’s Zhejiang province; the award was accepted on the village’s behalf by Demre’s mayor Fahri Duran and his wife Samiye Duran.

Candidates from more than 60 member states were assessed, and 52 places worldwide received the title. Four villages from Türkiye made the list: Akyaka (Muğla), Barbaros (İzmir), Anıtlı (Mardin) and Kale Üçağız (Antalya). Source: Anadolu Ajansı, 18 October 2025.

The criteria that weighed most in the assessment were also published: protection of cultural and natural assets, environmental and social sustainability, and whether tourism genuinely contributes to the local economy.

That is the news. The rest is what somebody who sails out of that bay every morning knows.

What sort of place Üçağız is

Üçağız is a small village on the shore of a sheltered bay directly opposite the island of Kekova. Because the islands close off the mouth of the bay, the water inside barely moves — which is why boats have sheltered here for centuries, and really why the village exists at all.

Ancient Teimiusa lies beneath the village. It is not a site you enter through a gate of its own: the sarcophagi stand between the houses, among the olive trees, and some of them stand in the water at the shore. That is the strangest and the best thing about Üçağız — the history has not been shut inside a marked-off section, it lies scattered through the village.

There are no large hotels. Around the jetty there are guesthouses, a few restaurants and the boats, and that is all.

How to get there — and why most people plan it wrong

There is a road to Üçağız; we write that plainly because the opposite is often claimed. It is 35 kilometres of mountain road from Demre. Public transport, though, is a single bus: it leaves at eight in the morning and comes back in the evening. For anyone wanting a day trip, the hours are tight.

The real point about arriving by land is this: the sunken city opposite the village, Kaleköy and the bays in between are not visible from land. If you drive to Üçağız and stop at the jetty, you go home without having seen the part of this coast that matters. We do not say that because we sell boat trips, but because the geography is what it is — even the Lycian Way crosses that coast on foot, while the road loops away over the mountains.

What happens after an award

Honestly: the first effect of titles like this is crowds. For a small village that can be good news or bad — which of the two it turns out to be depends on how the people who arrive treat the place.

Two pieces of advice if you are coming:

• Come early in the morning, or out of season. At midday in July and August the jetty gets busy. May, June, September and October are quiet, and the sea is warm.
• Leave money in the village. The citation for the award mentions “tourism’s contribution to local people”. In practice that means having breakfast in the village and eating the fish at the restaurant on the jetty.

Where to go around Üçağız, and which of it can be seen from land and which only from the sea, is set out with maps in the Demre travel guide. If you are thinking of walking the coast, our Lycian Way page describes this section step by step.