Saklikent National Park

This guide to Saklikent National Park opens with the legend of a shepherd who followed a wandering goat through a crack in a three-hundred-meter limestone wall and found the slot canyon carved by the Karacay River. It traces how Saklikent, hidden city, stayed a local secret known mainly to shepherds and Paleolithic cave-dwellers until villagers began leading visitors inside in the 1980s, and a state broadcast turned it into a national park by 1996. Expect cold water underfoot: the river is fed by snowmelt from the Taurus Mountains, numbing even in August.