The Lycian Way, stage by stage

How long is the Lycian Way, really?

You will see 500, 509, 520, 540 and 760 km quoted, sometimes on the same page. They are all describing the same trail at different dates. The original 1999 route was around 500 km. The 2022 edition of Kate Clow’s guidebook added roughly 170 km of new and alternative routes, and the Culture Routes Society, which maintains the trail, now gives the official figure as 760 km and about 35 days. A single end-to-end line without the optional loops is closer to 470 km.

So the honest answer is: 25 to 30 walking days if you take the main line and skip the loops, longer if you walk the variants, and a great deal shorter if you do what most people do and walk the best three to ten days of it. The stages below follow the official 30 routes in order, and each page says which variant it describes.

Which direction, and which airport?

The guidebook and the waymarking are written west to east: start at Ovacık above Ölüdeniz, finish near Antalya. The western third is coastal and gentle enough to find your legs on; the eastern third is high, thorny and badly served by pensions. Walking it that way round also means you arrive in Kaş at the end of the first week with a proper town, a gear shop and a harbour to sit in.

Fly into Dalaman for a westbound start. Ovacık is about an hour and a half by dolmuş and taxi from the airport. Fly into Antalya for the eastern stages or if you are only walking around Kaş and Kekova. Both routes to Kaş are described in our transport guides: from Dalaman and from Antalya.

When to walk it

The Culture Routes Society’s own recommendation is February to May or September to November. Spring is green, the springs are running and the sea is cold. Autumn is dry, the sea is warm into November and the springs on the mountain stages may not be. Mid-May to mid-September is too hot for the exposed stages, and December and January bring storms that close paths and pensions.

October and November are the months most people around Kaş actually walk. Village pensions along the trail start closing from the beginning of November, so the later you come, the more the stage plan has to bend around who is still open. That is exactly the kind of thing we will tell you when you write.

How the stages on this site work

Each stage is named the way people search for it, village to village, not by a route number nobody remembers. The numbers come from two sources: the official guidebook routes and Trekopedia’s GPS-measured sections, which are the only public source for ascent and descent per leg. Where the two disagree by a wide margin we show both and say so, rather than picking the friendlier figure.

Every stage page has the same summary box: distance, ascent, descent, time, grade, terrain, where you can sleep at the end, whether there is water on the way, and how you get on and off. Below that come the Lycian ruins on that stretch, because this coast is a string of abandoned cities and the trail walks straight through most of them.

Do you need a tent?

For most of the trail, no. Village pensions exist at the end of almost every stage from Fethiye to Demre and again from Finike to Çıralı, and in spring and autumn they expect walkers. The exceptions are the crossing of the Alaca Dağ between Demre and Finike, where there is nothing and camping is obligatory for one or two nights, and parts of the eastern mountains beyond Göynük, where accommodation is thin and sometimes closed.

Wild camping is a tolerated grey area away from villages and fenced ruins. It is forbidden inside the archaeological sites, on the Patara beach from March to the end of October because of the turtles, and open fires are banned in forest from June to the end of October. If you would rather not carry a tent at all, the answer is to skip the Demre to Finike crossing by bus, which is what most walkers do anyway.

Water

Water is the thing the trail is least generous with. Village mosques have taps, springs run reliably from March to early June and often not at all in late summer, and cisterns need treating. The stretch from Kabak to Kınık has running water only at the mosques in Bel and Dodurga. The dry peninsula beyond Boğazcık has no reliable source until Üçağız. The Alaca Dağ crossing and the Tahtalı pass are worse.

Carry three litres as a rule and five on the mountain stages. Each stage page below says what the sources report for that leg, and when we re-walk a stage we will add the date the spring was checked.

Maps, GPX and apps

The official guidebook is Kate Clow’s The Lycian Way, revised edition of 2022, with three 1:70,000 maps. The Culture Routes Society sends its GPX tracks to people who buy the book, so the official track is not something anyone may legally give away, and the free GPX files circulating on third-party sites are of unknown provenance. The society itself recommends OsmAnd as the app, because it maintains the route on OpenStreetMap, and explicitly does not recommend AllTrails, Outdooractive or Wikiloc for this trail. That OpenStreetMap route is open data, so we publish a free GPX of the Kaş section, Kalkan to Demre, derived from it under the ODbL licence: six tracks covering the inland route, the peninsula coast and both Demre variants. It is geometry, not advice; the stage pages are the advice.

The waymarks are red and white stripes in the French GR style, roughly every 50 to 100 metres, with yellow direction boards at junctions and a red cross meaning wrong way. The society warns of fake waymarks near Kaş, Boğazcık and Beycik, painted to lead walkers to particular businesses. If a stripe takes you somewhere the map does not, trust the map.

Luggage transfer and how we help

Bag transfer exists on the Lycian Way but is patchy: a handful of transfer companies cover the road-accessible stage ends, and pension owners quietly drive bags between villages for cash. Around Kaş it is complicated by geography. Boğazcık and Üçağız are on roads, Aperlai and Kaleköy are not, and the last leg into Simena goes by boat.

This is the part we do. Tell us your dates, how far you like to walk in a day and whether you want a guide, and a licensed local agency comes back with a stage plan, beds and bag transfers priced together. You pay the agency, not us, and there is no payment on this site.

The stages, west to east

Thirty stages following the official route order. Distances in km; time is the walking time reported by GPS-measured sources, not including breaks. Grades are ours: easy means a normal day for anyone who walks, hard means sustained steep ground or a very long day.