Kaş Dive Sites: Eighteen Places and How Deep They Are

Kaş was a diving town before it was a holiday town, and it still is one. The reason is the geology: this coast is limestone, so the seabed drops away in walls and canyons rather than shelving gently, and cold fresh groundwater surfaces through it and keeps the water unusually clear. Add two aircraft, several ships and a good deal of Bronze Age and Roman debris, and you have a site list that runs from a first try-dive to a mixed-gas descent to 71 metres.

Below is what is down there and roughly how deep. Take the depths as orientation rather than as a plan.

Before Anything Else

How diving works here

Every site on this page is reached by boat and dived with a Kaş dive centre. You cannot shore-dive most of them and you should not try.
Depths and conditions vary with current, season and swell, and a site that is straightforward one morning can be cancelled the next. Your guide decides on the day, not this article.
The deep wrecks are technical dives on mixed gas, not sport dives with a bit more weight.

If You Have Never Dived

• Güvercin Ada. The obvious first dive. Shallow water in the bay with Kemal Tufan’s shark sculpture standing on the bottom, which gives a beginner something to swim towards. Experienced divers use the same island for its wrecks and amphorae, so a mixed group can share a boat.
• Besmi Island, north-east side. Shallow enough for a try-dive, close to Meis, and shaped like a shoe, which is how it got its reputation before it got its name. The water deepens towards the south-west, so the same island serves every level.
• Çapa Banko. Anchors visible even in the shallows, plus amphorae and a millstone. Good marine life. There is a cave at 35 m which is not suitable for diving; stay out of it.
• Limanağzı Fener. Close to town, dived at every level and also used for night dives. At 22 m there is a Dakota C-47 aircraft, decommissioned and sunk deliberately, and the cargo bay is open enough for novices to swim through.

The Wrecks

Uçanbalık Bankosu holds the one people come for: a Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero, the Italian three-engine bomber, shot down by anti-aircraft fire while bombing Meis during the Second World War. It lies between 55 and 71 metres. This is a mixed-gas technical dive for divers qualified and current at that depth, and it is called off for current more often than any other site here. Those who make it report dentex, amberjack, barracuda and grouper around the airframe.

The Dimitri, at the Canyon, is the popular one. A cargo ship that ran aground in 1968 and was later blown up with dynamite; fragments lie in the first five metres, and the main wreck sits between 27 and 42 metres. She carried cotton, which is why everyone calls her the Pamuk wreck. She is old and fragile, so look and do not touch. On the route there is a memorial to Gökhan Türe, well known to the Kaş diving community, which you will pass at around 30 metres.

Two more. A wooden Ottoman wreck at 23 m off Limanağzı, with a large water jar still in place. And the coast guard vessel TCSG-119 at 30 m on the Neptün site, where the shallowest point is only 8 m and the amphorae date from the second century.

Archaeology Underwater

Hidayet, the cove named after the man who looked after it, has a dive site a little offshore known as the underwater archaeopark, or locally as the Stonehenge for the way the seabed is arranged. On the east side, at Uluburun, sits a wreck and a spread of amphorae. Be clear about what this is: the famous Uluburun ship, a Late Bronze Age vessel and one of the most important wrecks ever excavated, is in the museum at Bodrum. What lies here is a replica, built in Kaş and sunk on purpose, and it is none the worse for it.

Kovanlı Island takes its name from the beehives local people once kept on it, and it is the best site here for anchors and amphorae. Neptün and Çapa Banko both have amphorae too, the latter with a millstone alongside.

What You Will See, and What You Must Leave Alone

Grouper and dusky grouper on most of the banks, dentex, amberjack and barracuda in the current, rays, moray and stingray over the mixed sand and rock at Heybeli, and loggerhead turtles anywhere. Deve Taşı, two humps rising to 14 m and named for the obvious reason, is a good one for grouper if you have the experience.

Mağara II, dived when the wind is easterly because it is sheltered then, has a wooden boat at 24 m known as the Lycian wreck, and a cave further north. Entering that cave is prohibited. It is a Mediterranean monk seal haul-out and it is protected, and the monk seal is one of the most endangered marine mammals in the world. Dive the site, admire the entrance, stay outside.

The whole area is the Kaş-Kekova Special Environmental Protection Area. Nothing comes up: not an amphora fragment, not a piece of the Dimitri, not a shell.