Alanya

The headland has been fortified for more than two thousand years. As Coracesium it stayed loyal in the 140s BC to Diodotus Tryphon, who had seized the Seleucid crown, and the rock was long a base for the pirates who preyed on Roman shipping until Pompey defeated them off this coast in 67 BC. Under Rome and Byzantium it remained a minor port, changing hands as the empire's frontier with Arab fleets moved up and down the shore.

The town's defining moment came in 1221, when the Seljuk sultan Alaeddin Keykubad I took the castle and made the place a winter residence and naval base, renaming it Alaiye. Within a few years he had built the octagonal Red Tower over the harbour, the vaulted shipyard beside it and much of the circuit of walls that still rings the hill, using it to build the galleys that gave the Seljuks a Mediterranean fleet. After the Mongol defeat of the Seljuks the coast passed to the Karamanids, who sold the town to the Mamluks of Egypt in 1427, and it was taken into the Ottoman Empire in 1471, after which Alaiye declined into a small port trading in timber and citrus.

The modern name dates from 1935, when Atatürk's visit was followed by the change from Alaiye to Alanya. The town was still small and awkward to reach in the 1960s, when Turkish visitors began coming for the air in Damlataş Cave; the coastal highway, charter flights into Antalya and the opening of Gazipaşa airport in 2010 transformed it. From the 1980s the beaches on either side of the rock filled with hotels and apartment blocks, German and Scandinavian visitors arrived in large numbers, and Alanya became both a mass resort and a place where foreigners bought property and settled. The castle and the shipyard were put on Turkey's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage status in 2009.

Alanya is the most internationally settled town on this coast. Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch, Russians and, in recent years, Iranians and Central Asians own flats and spend part or all of the year here, and whole suburbs — Oba, Tosmur, Mahmutlar — have shops, estate agents, doctors and restaurants working in several languages. The result is a town where Turkish provincial life, mass package tourism and a large resident foreign community overlap in the same streets.

The Turkish side of that culture is unmistakable once away from the seafront: the bazaar, tea gardens where men play okey and backgammon, mosques filling on Friday, families walking the promenade after dark, and weddings that take over whole restaurants in summer. In the mountains immediately behind the town, Yörük families keep flocks on summer pastures and weave rugs from goat hair, and the district's old trade in silk, cotton and timber is remembered in the Seljuk caravanserai at Alarahan on the inland road.

The castle rock defines the town's image of itself, appearing on everything from municipal signs to fridge magnets, and its illuminated walls are the view from almost every hotel. Boat trips around the headland to the sea caves, the cable car up the hill and the nightlife strip behind the harbour are the three things almost every visitor does, and the town has grown practised at accommodating very large numbers of people without much friction.

The district has roughly 365,000 residents, and the population rises sharply in summer. Alanya has one of the largest foreign resident populations of any Turkish district, with thousands of European residents and property owners, many of them retired, alongside Turkish families who have moved from inland Anatolia for work in tourism and construction.

Tourism and property are the economy. Hotels, restaurants, excursion operators, estate agencies and building firms employ most of the workforce, and construction of apartment blocks along the coast has been continuous for decades. Agriculture remains important in the valleys: this is one of the few places in Turkey warm enough for bananas, grown under plastic and in the open along the coast, together with avocados, citrus, pomegranates and greenhouse vegetables. Fishing continues from the harbour on a small scale.

The year divides sharply. From May to October the coast road is jammed, the promenade is busy past midnight and every business runs seven days a week; in winter a good share of the hotels close and the town settles into the pace of a provincial centre, kept going by its residents. Rents and property prices driven by foreign demand, water supply, the density of building along the shore and the risk of wildfire and earthquake are the constant local subjects.

The cooking is Mediterranean Turkish, with the produce of an unusually warm coast behind it. Fish from the harbour — sea bass, bream, calamari and octopus — is grilled plainly with lemon and rocket, and meze tables carry aubergine salads, stuffed vine leaves, samphire in olive oil, garlic yoghurt and hibeş, a tahini and cumin dip common along this part of the coast. Rakı, the aniseed spirit, is the drink that goes with them.

Inland the food is heartier: lamb tandır cooked slowly until it falls off the bone, testi kebab sealed in a clay pot, trout from the cold rivers of the mountain valleys, and gözleme made on a griddle at roadside places and market stalls. Antalya province's piyaz, a white-bean salad bound with tahini and eaten with köfte, is on most local menus, and the ready-cooked stews and vegetable dishes of the lokanta are the everyday lunch.

The district's fruit is its speciality. Bananas grown on this coast are small, fragrant and sold everywhere, fresh and as juice or ice cream; avocados, pomegranates, citrus, carob and loquats grow in the same warm strip. Sweet things include Turkish delight flavoured with local fruit, künefe made with shredded pastry and cheese, and tahini halva. Breakfast is the long Turkish spread of cheeses, olives, eggs, tomatoes, honey and clotted kaymak, and tea in tulip glasses runs through the day.