Butterfly Valley

About this place

Between two rock walls that climb to roughly 350 metres, a narrow slot opens onto a pebble beach that no road and no car can reach. This is Butterfly Valley, just south of Ölüdeniz: a first-category nature reserve since 1995, where building is forbidden by law, which is why it still looks the way it does: a camp of tents and wooden huts, one simple restaurant, limited electricity, and a stream that runs to the sea for most of the year. The butterflies that named the place, most famously the Jersey tiger with its striped forewings and orange-red hindwings, appear from June to September, and mostly in the shady depths of the valley rather than on the beach itself. The only sensible way in is by sea. From Fethiye take the dolmuş to Ölüdeniz, about 25 minutes, and on Belceğiz beach find the shuttle-boat booth, the first one as you walk down, before the row of private boat companies. In high season the first boat out is around 10:00 or 11:00 and boats come back from the valley roughly hourly from 13:00 until about 17:00; outside it the service thins to about three sailings a day. The crossing takes 20 to 30 minutes, and a return ticket was 700 TL in summer 2025, so expect somewhere between 700 and 1,000 TL in 2026, cash or card at the booth; the private boats next door ask several times that. Most of the Ölüdeniz day-boat tours also stop here for an hour's swim, and for most visitors that is enough. The rope-assisted path down from the village of Faralya is brutally steep and has killed people; the authorities have officially closed it and signposted it as prohibited, so do not attempt it, and certainly not with children. The water is clear and cold and the pebbles are coarse, so bring water shoes. The walk to the waterfall at the back of the valley takes about half an hour on a dirt trail through oleander, figs and carob, with a rocky, rope-assisted scramble at the end, and finishes at a fall of around 50 metres that drops in two stages and thins to a trickle by late summer. At midday the beach fills with passengers from the tour boats, then empties abruptly after four, which is the golden hour for anyone staying the night at the camp. Be honest with yourself before you commit a whole day: the famous photograph of the valley, that blue slit between two mountains, is taken from the lay-by on the Faralya road above it, costs nothing and needs no boat, and the valley from below is narrower and plainer than the picture suggests. For a family the boat and a swim make a pleasant outing, but there is no pushchair access here and very little shade on the beach, and in August the heat is punishing everywhere except deep inside the valley. The season runs roughly April to October; in winter the boats run only on demand and in good weather, and the camp closes.