Lara Beach

Lara runs east from Antalya along the Turkish Mediterranean, a long straight shore of golden sand backed by a pine belt and, behind that, a line of very large hotels — several built as replicas of other places, which is the detail everyone reports first.

The strip is the product of a deliberate state programme. Turkey's tourism ministry designated this coast for development from the 1980s with incentives for large-capacity hotels, and the result is a concentration of thousand-room properties running east from the city. The scale is genuinely unusual: some individual hotels here hold more beds than entire resort towns elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

The beach itself is fine golden sand with a gradual entry and generally calm water — this is a sheltered stretch of the Mediterranean with little swell. It is also a loggerhead turtle nesting beach, and the sections where they come ashore are protected, with restrictions on lighting, vehicles and furniture during the season from roughly May to September. The two facts sit awkwardly together and the management of that tension is a matter of continuing debate.

Development is a hotel line rather than a town. Each property has its own frontage, its own sunbeds and its own everything; there is no promenade and no commercial street. Antalya's old town, Kaleiçi, is twenty minutes west and is a different proposition entirely. Konyaaltı and Lara's municipal section at the western end are the beaches Antalya itself uses, free and pebbled in the first case, and they are where the city's own population goes rather than the strip.

Loggerheads nest on this sand between May and September and thousand-room hotels stand behind it, and the two facts have been managed rather than reconciled. Lighting is restricted, furniture is cleared, and the argument continues. Konyaaltı in Antalya is where the city's own people swim.