The Best Places to Drink and Stay in Turkey

The Bay of Güllük sits quietly off the northeast tip of the Bodrum Peninsula, and this 26-suite boutique hotel leans into that calm, with bay views from nearly every angle and a rooftop restaurant above the water. The rooms borrow from a groovy early-Seventies Italian film palette, cinnamon and tangerine swapped out by theme. The lounge bar opens onto a garden by the pool. Bodrum proper is an hour away, which is, depending on the week, either the problem or the point.

A boutique hotel carved into a steep cliffside above Fethiye's marina, where the terraced architecture does most of the talking. Nineteen rooms step down the rock face, old salvaged beams and heavy stone built into a structure that's practically new, which gives the whole place an appealing identity crisis. Balconies look out over the Turquoise Coast, there's a hammam, a pool deck, and a private yacht if the budget runs that direction.

A resort on a sapphire bay outside Fethiye with thirty-seven pools, eleven restaurants, and a kids' club designed by Turkey's only child-focused architecture firm, complete with a robotics lab and a disco running until eleven. Adults have a child-free enclave. The breakfast buffet alone runs to fifteen kinds of olive. The Lycian Way hiking trail passes through the hills just above.

The rooms are pure white, every last surface, and the effect somehow avoids being clinical through disciplined lighting and a few strategic hits of color. This cliff-side resort on Antalya's south coast pairs that boutique aesthetic with full megahotel infrastructure, including a pool and spa complex, beach club, tennis, and a kids' club. The restaurant goes full red, as if to get the argument out of the way early. Families and the ultra-hip crowd coexist without apparent tension.

Hadrian's Gate is visible from the garden where breakfast arrives each morning, which sets the tone for this fourteen-room boutique hotel tucked just inside Antalya's old city walls. No two rooms are alike: some have rough stone walls, others lean sleeker and more urban, but each one mixes antique objects with contemporary design in a way that feels considered rather than curated. The same garden turns to cocktails by evening.

A beachfront resort on the Turkish Riviera with enough pools, restaurants, and bars to make the ruins at Perge feel like a detour you'll get to tomorrow. The dining spans traditional Turkish to outdoor BBQ, with cocktail bars, two pool bars, a beach club, and a nightclub handling the evenings. Add a spa, tennis courts, and an aquapark, and leaving the property starts to feel like a logistical problem nobody asked for.

Eight rooms in a timber-and-stone chalet lodge, parked at 900 meters in the cedar and pine forests above Antalya, with verandas that frame an unbroken drop to the Mediterranean. The Lycian Way runs nearby, ancient Phaselis is a short drive, and the waterfalls are free. Evenings, the in-house restaurant called The Rabbit Hole runs a daily tasting menu built around whatever the land and sea produced that morning, with a minimum-waste kitchen behind it.

A boutique hotel in a 19th-century Aegean mansion on Cunda Island, where the walls have been through enough to write a memoir. The building once doubled as a wartime bakery, and the family rented rooms long before anyone called it hospitality. Restored now as a protected monument, it sits on Cumhuriyet Caddesi with upper rooms opening onto sea-view balconies. The kind of small hotel that makes you feel like you've found something the guidebooks keep almost mentioning.