Kaleiçi, from the gate to the harbour

You are standing on the boulevard that runs along the eastern wall of Kaleiçi, Antalya's old town. The name means inner castle, and the district still sits inside a horseshoe of double walls with the sea on its open side. The tram rails under your feet were laid in 1999 for secondhand cars from Nuremberg, and the stop here is called Üç Kapılar, Three Gates, after the Roman arch the city uses as its front door. Behind the wall, some three thousand red-roofed houses wait in the lanes. Hesapçı Sokak runs straight in from the arch; that is where the walk goes. The arch itself is impossible to miss: three marble openings set between two towers, right in the wall line.

In 1972 the whole of Kaleiçi, inner harbour included, was declared a conservation area, and that is why the lanes ahead kept their stone ground floors and timber upper storeys while the city outside grew tall. Up through the quiet side of the old town along İmaret Sokak, five minutes. The lanes end at Kalekapısı, literally the castle gate, named for the fortress gate that stood here; the tram stop on the main road still carries the name. You will know the square by a tall stone tower with a clock face turned to each side, standing where the lane opens out.

Two minutes round the back of the clock tower along Izmirli Ali Efendi Sokak, all of it on the level, a relief after the lanes. The walled garden you are heading for is not one building but a whole Seljuk precinct: a dervish lodge thought to date from 1255 shares the ground with an old bath and two tombs, one of them raised in 1377, and the whirling dervishes used the lodge from the sixteenth century on. The arrival needs no description: a fluted brick shaft rises from a walled garden ahead of you, ribbed like a bundle of organ pipes, the minaret the whole city has adopted as its symbol.

Back out along Izmirli Ali Efendi Sokak and on through the walkways to the city's main square, five minutes on the flat. Republic Square is where modern Antalya gathers: shops, business centres and public buildings ring it, and until the heritage tram was suspended in the summer of 2026, Cumhuriyet Meydanı was its central stop, the place on the single track where the two old cars passed each other. In daylight it is mostly the wind off the sea and people leaning on the balustrade. The square is unmistakable because the ground simply ends. Walk to the railing and the Roman harbour lies straight below you, masts and all, with a bronze horseman keeping watch over it.

The paths from the square zigzag down the cliff face to the water, four minutes, with the harbour growing larger below you. On the way down you pass the old city's defences at close quarters. Antalya was ringed by two lines of walls, and the inner one wraps the harbour in a half-circle, so the stone beside the path belongs to the same circuit that enclosed Kaleiçi above. Below, the water inside the basin is still and green, rigging clinks against masts, and boatmen call out the day's trips. You arrive on the quay itself. Excursion boats nose in beside the sailing yachts, and the old wall rises straight out of the water on the far side of the basin.

Walk along the quay and climb a little way up Tuz Kapısı Sokak, the street of the Salt Gate, four minutes. The name is a reminder of what passed through this harbour: in its Byzantine and Seljuk centuries it shipped timber, olives, grain, textiles, tar and citrus from the hinterland, and sat on the sea road between Egypt and Constantinople. Boats rock at their moorings below you; above, the lanes stack up the slope. The stop is easy to spot and easy to walk past: a tiny six-sided pavilion, hardly bigger than a kiosk, raised on stone piers at the harbour's edge.

Back down Tuz Kapısı Sokak and along the walkways that skirt the harbour's southern curve, four minutes. The harbour you are leaving had a working face once: a customs house and a large flour mill went up at the harbour in the early twentieth century, when the great tower that had guarded its entrance was already a ruin, and renovation works at the end of the 1960s cleared all three away. Today the sea wall is bare stone with the old town's houses looking over it. The path narrows between wall and water, then opens on a small pocket of beach tucked under the fortifications, with the harbour mouth to one side and the cliff rising above. A beach below a medieval wall: you have arrived.

The sea drops away behind you, and the harbour noise thins to your own footsteps on the cobbles: six minutes of steps up from the water onto Fırın Sokak. Fırın is the bakery, a lane named for a trade. In 1984 the restoration of these streets won the FIJET Golden Apple, the tourism writers' prize, and the houses you pass are its result: stone below, timber above, red tiles, and the sea glimpsed down every gap. The stop is the lane itself. You have arrived where Fırın Sokak levels out between restored houses and the timber upper floors push out over the stone walls on both sides, close over the lane.

Lane names around here read like the old town's job list: Tabakhane is the tannery, Hesapçı the accountant. A short loop of three minutes brings you onto Hesapçı Sokak, the spine of the quarter, the lane that runs from Hadrian's Gate to the cliffs. This stretch is quieter than the end by the gate. The paving is narrow and stone, timber upper storeys lean out over it, and bougainvillea spills from the walls of hidden courtyards; the noise of the gate falls away until you hear mostly footsteps. Look for a minaret that stops short: a stone shaft cut off flat, with no cap, rising beside a long stone hall on your right. That is the stop.

Hıdırlık means a place of Khidr: ground where the Hıdırellez spring festival was celebrated, and the name has stuck to both the lane and the tower at the end of it. Along the long run of Hıdırlık Sokak to the southern tip of the old town, five minutes. This was the corner of the fortress where the land walls and the sea walls met, and the houses thin out as you approach it. Hıdırlık Sokak ends in open air. A round stone drum on a square base stands on the cliff edge, with the park spreading out beyond it and the sea on two sides.

Three minutes along the cliff path and you are in Karaalioğlu Park, lawns and palms laid out on the clifftop with the sea directly below. Three lookouts along the edge take in the whole gulf. The long curve of shore across the water is Konyaaltı, a beach of small pebbles rather than sand, backed by the city's newer towers; beyond it rise the Beydağları, the western Taurus, which keep snow on their high peaks well into spring while people swim below. The walk ends here, on a bench under the palms, with the old town's roofs behind you. The first cliff-edge lookout, with the mountains across the water, is your stop.