Bodrum: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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Bodrum is Halicarnassus, the capital of Caria, and the town is built directly on top of it — so the ancient city appears in fragments between hotels rather than as a site you walk around. Two things came out of it that everyone uses without knowing: the word mausoleum, from the tomb of King Mausolus, and the discipline of history, from Herodotus, who was born here. Two hours, and the castle alone takes another two.

A short history of Bodrum

Bodrum is ancient Halicarnassus, where the historian Herodotus was born around 484 BC. In the middle of the 4th century BC the tomb of King Mausolus was built here, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the word 'mausoleum' comes from his name. In 334 BC Alexander the Great captured it after a siege. At the beginning of the 15th century the Knights Hospitaller built the Castle of St Peter, using stones from the Mausoleum, which had collapsed in earthquakes. In 1522 the city passed to the Ottomans. Today the castle houses a museum of underwater archaeology.

The ten best sights in Bodrum

1
Bodrum
Two bays either side of the castle, and everything in town is a 20-minute walk
2
Bodrum Castle
600 lira, built by the Knights of St John from 1402, and three hours is not too long
3
Underwater Archaeology Museum
Inside the castle, included, and the Uluburun shipwreck is the reason to come
4
Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
200 lira, one of the Seven Wonders, and what is left is the foundation pit
5
Ancient Theatre
Free, cut into the hill above the road, and it still holds concerts in summer
6
Myndos Gate
Free, the western gate of Mausolus’s wall, and Alexander besieged the city here
7
Zeki Müren Museum
100 lira, the house of Turkey’s most famous singer, kept exactly as he left it
8
Maritime Museum
150 lira, on the harbour, and the boat-building models are the part to see
9
The windmills
Free, on the ridge between the two bays, and they ground flour until the 1970s
10
Neyzen Tevfik quay
The west-bay waterfront, and the gulets tie up along the whole length of it

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A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Bodrum:

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Halicarnassus under the resort

Bodrum Castle · The Knights of St John began it in 1402 and finished it over a century, and they built it out of the Mausoleum — the tomb had been shaken apart by earthquakes and its marble was lying there, so the green volcanic stone and the carved blocks in the walls are the Seven Wonder. In 1523 the knights handed the castle to Suleiman without a fight, because Rhodes had fallen and there was nothing left to defend.
Underwater Archaeology Museum · Inside the castle, and it holds the Uluburun wreck — a ship that sank off this coast in about 1300 BC carrying ten tonnes of copper ingots, a tonne of tin, Canaanite jars of resin, ebony from Africa, ostrich eggs and a gold scarab bearing the name of Nefertiti. It is the richest Bronze Age cargo ever found, and it proved that long-distance trade in that period was far larger than anyone had assumed.
Mausoleum of Halicarnassus · What is left is a rectangular pit and some column drums, and that is the whole of a building that stood forty-five metres high for sixteen centuries. It was built for Mausolus by his sister, who was also his wife — Artemisia the Second — and the four best sculptors in Greece each took one side. The surviving statues are in the British Museum, taken in 1846.
Ancient Theatre · Cut into the hillside in the fourth century BC and enlarged by the Romans to seat about thirteen thousand — which in a city of that size means almost everyone could sit in it at once. That is the usual ratio for a Greek theatre and it tells you what the building was for: not entertainment as an option but the assembly of the whole town.
Myndos Gate · The western gate of the seven-kilometre wall Mausolus built, and the place where Alexander’s siege of 334 BC was decided: the defenders came out through it to burn his siege towers, were driven back, and the gate jammed with men trying to get in. Alexander took the city and left the two citadels standing, which is unusual for him.
The windmills · Seven stone mills on the ridge between the two bays, built in the eighteenth century, and they worked until the 1970s — the last one stopped when electric mills reached the peninsula. They are on the ridge because the meltem blows across it from the north all summer, which is the same wind that makes the sailing here what it is.

The peninsula, bay by bay

The Bodrum peninsula is about thirty kilometres long with a different village in every bay, and they are genuinely not interchangeable: Gümbet is loud, Gümüşlük has no hotels at all because building is banned over the ruins, Gölturkbükü is where Istanbul money goes, and the north shore faces the wind while the south shore does not. A day with a car, or the dolmuş minibuses, which run until late and cost almost nothing.

Gümüşlük · Ancient Myndos is under and around this village, and because of it the whole bay is a first-degree protected site — no new building of any kind, which is why there is not one hotel in it. The restaurants put their tables in the shallow water. Everything here looks the way it does because of an archaeological ruling rather than a planning preference.
Rabbit Island · You walk to it. The causeway is the ancient breakwater of the Myndos harbour, now about half a metre under water, and it runs straight out from the shore — so the crossing is knee-deep the whole way and the stones under your feet are the harbour wall. The rabbits that gave it its name are gone.
Sandıma · A stone village above Yalıkavak that was emptied twice: first in 1923 when its Greek families were exchanged, and then in the 1960s when the remaining Turkish families moved down to the coast for water and work. It was left standing and roofless, and a handful of the houses have been bought and rebuilt in the last ten years.
Yalıkavak · This was a sponge-diving village until the trade collapsed — Bodrum men dived for sponges across the whole Aegean, without equipment at first and then with helmets that killed or crippled a high proportion of them. The marina that replaced it now berths some of the largest private yachts in the Mediterranean, in the same water.
Gölturkbükü · Two villages, Göl and Türkbükü, merged into one name, and it became the summer address of Istanbul’s media and business world in the 1990s. The beach clubs here are built on wooden platforms out over the water rather than on sand, because there is almost no beach — the shoreline is rock.
Akyarlar · The south-western corner, and the sand here is finer than anywhere else on the peninsula because the headland shelters it from the meltem — the wind that sorts coarse sand out of every exposed beach. It is also the closest point to Kos, about four kilometres, and on a clear day the Greek island fills the view.

Caria inland

Behind the coast is Caria, which was its own country with its own language before it was Greek or Roman, and the sites are an hour inland with almost nobody at them. Mylasa was the capital before Mausolus moved it to the coast; Labraunda was its mountain sanctuary, reached by a sacred way; and Stratonikeia has a modern village still living inside the ancient streets. A full day, and a car is required.

Milas · Mylasa was the Carian capital before Mausolus, and the Carians were not Greeks: they had their own language, written in their own alphabet, which was only deciphered properly in the 1990s using bilingual inscriptions found in Egypt — where Carian mercenaries had served the pharaohs and carved graffiti in both scripts.
Euromos · The temple of Zeus Lepsynos stands almost complete in an olive grove by the road, and it carries its own unfinished state as evidence: some columns are fluted and some are left smooth, because each one was paid for by a named donor and the inscriptions are still on them. The money ran out before every column had a sponsor.
Labraunda · A sanctuary of Zeus high on a mountain, connected to Mylasa by a paved sacred way fourteen kilometres long that was walked in procession — and the point of building it up there was political: Mausolus and his family poured money into it to make a Carian cult site that outranked the Greek ones, which is state-building through architecture.
Stratonikeia · An ancient city with an Ottoman village built inside it and still partly lived in — you walk down a colonnaded Roman street and the houses either side are nineteenth century with people’s washing out. The village was ordered to move in the 1980s for excavation and most of it did, but a few families refused and are still there.
Lagina · The sanctuary of Hecate, and it is the only major temple to her known anywhere — she was the goddess of crossroads, thresholds and witchcraft, which made her a household figure rather than a civic one, so temples to her are rare. A sacred way nine kilometres long linked it to Stratonikeia and the key-bearing procession along it was the city’s main festival.
Iasos · A port city on its own small peninsula, and what it was known for in antiquity is fish: the water here is unusually rich and the ancient sources joke about how much the people of Iasos ate. The agora, the theatre and a Roman fish market are all on the shore, and the site is free and usually empty.

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Getting to Bodrum and getting around

Milas-Bodrum Airport · 32 kilometres out, and the Havaş shuttle meets the flights
Bodrum bus station · All the minibuses to the peninsula villages leave from here
Bodrum Marina · The ferry to Kos is 20 minutes, and the gulet trips leave from this quay
Yalıkavak Marina · The superyacht harbour, 15 kilometres out, and the ferry to Kalymnos runs from it

Cheap eats in Bodrum

Aegean food is the opposite of central Anatolian: olive oil instead of butter, vegetables and wild greens instead of lamb, and fish. Two things here are local by name. Çökertme kebabı comes from a village on the gulf an hour away — beef strips over matchstick potatoes with garlic yoghurt poured across — and the Bodrum mandarin is a protected variety grown in the groves behind Bitez, pressed into everything from jam to raki. And the greens: twenty or thirty wild herbs are picked and served boiled with lemon, which is a habit the Greek families left behind.

Bodrum bazaar lanes · 60 to 150 lira a plate, and the herb trays empty by two
Bodrum fish quay · From about 400 lira with the cooking fee, and ask what is wild
Musto · About 600 lira, meyhane tables by the water, and meze with raki is the meal
Orfoz · About 2,500 lira, eight tables, and booked weeks ahead
Gümüşlük fish row · From 500 lira, tables set in the shallow water, and sunset is the sitting
Limon · About 700 lira, on the hill above Gümüşlük, and go for the sunset not the food
Yalıkavak market · Thursday morning, and the mandarins are November to January
Ortakent market · Honey, olive oil and the wild herbs, and it is finished by noon

Museums in Bodrum

Bodrum has one world-class museum and it is inside the castle: the Museum of Underwater Archaeology, which exists because this stretch of coast is where ships sank. The Institute of Nautical Archaeology has been excavating wrecks off here since the 1960s and essentially invented the discipline doing it, so the objects in the castle are not a collection that was bought — they were brought up a few hundred metres from where you are standing.

Underwater Archaeology Museum · Included with the castle, and the wreck halls have separate opening hours
Bodrum Castle · 600 lira, five towers named after the knights’ nations, and two hours minimum
Mausoleum site · 200 lira, a pit and some drums, and 30 minutes with the model in the shed
Zeki Müren Museum · 100 lira, his clothes and piano as they were, and 40 minutes
Maritime Museum · 150 lira, on the harbour, and an hour is enough
Ancient Theatre · Free, 13,000 seats, and summer concerts are held in it
Stratonikeia · 200 lira, an Ottoman village inside a Roman city, and some houses are lived in
Euromos · 200 lira, a near-complete temple in an olive grove, and 30 minutes

Nature and day trips near Bodrum

Two facts of geography run everything here. The meltem is a steady north-westerly that blows most summer days, which is why the north shore has wind and the south shore does not, why the windmills are on the ridge, and why Bodrum became a sailing town. And the coast is drowned — the sea rose into river valleys, which is what makes the deep sheltered bays and the submerged harbour walls you can walk on.

Gökova Gulf · A gulet day is from 2,500 lira, and three days is the real trip
Orak Island · The clearest water near Bodrum, reached by boat only, and every day trip stops there
Kara Ada · About 800 lira for the boat day, and bring an old swimsuit
Aquarium Cove · Named for the visibility, boats moor in it, and the snorkelling is the reason
Bağla and the far coves · Dirt tracks off the Akyarlar road, no shade and no water, and take both
Kissebükü · Free, no facilities at all, and the walk down is 40 minutes
Mazı · 22 kilometres east, almost undeveloped, and the coves below it are empty
Ören · 47 kilometres round the gulf, a quiet pebble beach, and ancient Keramos is behind it

Things to do in Bodrum with kids

Bodrum Castle · 600 lira, towers and battlements to climb, and the peacocks live in the courtyard
Rabbit Island · Free, you wade across knee-deep, and water shoes make it easier
Akyarlar · Fine sand and shallow water for a long way out, and this is the family beach
Camel Beach · There are camels and you can ride one, and the bay itself is calm
Kara Ada boat trip · About 800 lira, a whole day on a boat with swimming stops, and lunch is included
Bitez · Shallow and calm in the morning, windsurf lessons in the afternoon, and shade from the trees
The windmills · Free, a 15-minute walk up, and both bays are visible from the top
Ortakent Yahşi · The longest sand beach on the peninsula, free, and there is room to run

Nightlife in Bodrum

Bodrum invented Turkish summer nightlife and it has three separate versions of it. The bar street behind the east bay is the old loud one, going since the seventies. Gümbet is the cheap young version. And Yalıkavak and Gölturkbükü are the expensive one, where a table at a beach club costs more than a hotel room. The thing to know is the hour: nothing starts before eleven and the clubs run to four.

Bar street · Drinks from 300 lira, nothing starts before eleven, and it runs to four
Marina Yacht Club · About 800 lira a head, on the marina, and it is the respectable end of the night
Gümbet · The cheap loud bay two kilometres west, and it is almost entirely a young British crowd
Yalıkavak Marina · Walking the quay is free, a drink is from 500 lira, and sunset is the hour
Gölturkbükü · Beach clubs on wooden platforms, a day bed from 2,000 lira, and book ahead
Gümüşlük at night · No clubs at all, tables in the water, and it empties by midnight
Turgutreis sunset · The west-facing marina, free to walk, and the sun goes down behind Kos
Musto · Meyhane on the water, about 600 lira, and the raki table runs late

Holy places in Bodrum

There is no great mosque or cathedral here — Bodrum was a small fishing town for most of its modern history. What there is instead is a layered record of who believed what: Carian sanctuaries inland, Greek temples on the coast, a crusader castle with a chapel, Ottoman mosques in the lanes, and the empty Greek Orthodox churches left by the 1923 exchange.

Labraunda · 200 lira, 55 kilometres out up a mountain road, and almost nobody goes
Lagina · Free, the only major temple of Hecate known anywhere, and 66 kilometres out
Euromos · 200 lira, a temple of Zeus with half its columns left unfluted, and the donors’ names are on them
Bodrum Castle chapel · Inside the castle ticket, and look up at the ribs
Stratonikeia · 200 lira, and a Roman street, an Ottoman mosque and a hamam stand side by side
Sandıma · Free, the roofless Greek village, and its church shell is at the top end
Pedasa · Free, 40 minutes up from Konacık, and no shade on the path
Iasos · Free, a Roman fish market and a basilica on the shore, and usually empty

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Frequently asked questions about Bodrum

What is there to see in Bodrum?

The top sights in Bodrum are Bodrum, Bodrum Castle and Underwater Archaeology Museum. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Bodrum?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Bodrum without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Bodrum?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Bodrum, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Halicarnassus under the resort.

How do you get to Bodrum and get around?

The main ways are Milas-Bodrum Airport, Bodrum bus station and Bodrum Marina. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Bodrum, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Bodrum that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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