Sarıgerme Beach

This guide to Sarıgerme Beach in Muğla starts with a protected sea lily growing straight out of the sand and uses it to introduce a Carian port town, Panormus, that the geographer Strabo mentioned in passing two thousand years ago and that has never been located since. It follows the loggerhead turtles that still nest on this same stretch after dark, and the local group now working to protect both the buried town's memory and the turtles' ground from encroaching hotels. Walk the beach slowly at dusk, when the turtles come ashore and leave only a track the tide erases by morning.