Antalya Diving: The Dive Sites, the Permits and the 30-Metre Ceiling

Where the diving sits along Antalya’s 630 kilometres of coast

The province covers 20,723 square kilometres and its whole southern edge is sea. The governorship gives the length of that edge as 630 kilometres. The Antalya Chamber of Commerce and Industry publishes 640. Both figures are in circulation.

That edge is not one coast. In the west, Kaş and Demre face a steep Lycian shore with almost no beach. In the middle the city sits on a plateau that ends in cliffs above the water. East of it the Pamphylian plain runs flat past Side and Manavgat to Alanya and Gazipaşa.

The provincial culture and tourism directorate lists its own diving areas, and the list stops well short of the eastern end: Kaş, Kalkan, Kemer and Tekirova, the cliffs of the city itself, Finike, and a single aircraft wreck off Manavgat. Nothing east of Manavgat appears in it.

The gap is legal rather than geological. Two instruments decide what happens in the water here: one governs the business that takes you out, the other governs the seabed you may look at.

A dive business here holds a permit from the governor’s office

The enabling statute is the Tourism Encouragement Act No. 2634 of 12 March 1982. Article 37(C)(3) lets the Ministry of Culture and Tourism set rules for sport run as a tourism activity, and it did that in the Tourism Purpose Sporting Activity Regulation, published in the Resmî Gazete of 23 February 2011, issue 27855.

The document that regulation creates is an izin belgesi, and the issuer is the valilik, the provincial governor’s office. A business takes one permit for each type of activity it runs. An amendment of 1 June 2018, issue 30438, set the term: not less than one year, and up to five years on request.

Diving at sea is handled through a second document. Article 9(2) says the marine tourism vehicle operator certificate, also issued by the governorship, stands in place of the permit, and Article 5 requires any travel agency or hotel running underwater activity at sea to hold that certificate alongside its own operating licence.

The gatekeeper is a board, and its membership tells you how the state sees diving. For underwater and surface activity at sea the Sporting Tourism Board seats seven: the governor or a deputy governor, in a district the kaymakam; the provincial culture and tourism director; the provincial youth and sports director; the harbour master; the coast guard commander; a Chamber of Shipping representative; and one expert.

That board issues the yeterlilik belgesi, the qualification certificate. The file behind it must include a licence from the relevant sport federation for every member of staff working the activity, test papers for the equipment, and accident and liability cover for both staff and customers. That cover is a condition of the certificate rather than an add-on sold on the day, which is a different thing from your own dive insurance.

Article 8 puts the map-drawing on the governorship too: a beach contact point with warning signs in at least three languages, a buoyed safe area separated from swimming zones, and, inside water announced as open to diving, dive sites bounded by coordinates, from artificial reefs and sunken aircraft to amphorae and natural formations.

None of this is published as a roll. The provincial directorate keeps pages for certified businesses and marine tourism vehicles without listing permit holders, so the permit has to be checked with the operator or the directorate. The underwater sports federation’s register of authorised diving centres is queried through the national e-Devlet portal instead. Which registers can be read logs what each source returned.

The 30-metre ceiling and the rest of the 1990 rulebook

What a diver may actually do in Turkish water comes from a short, old instrument: the Regulation on Scuba Diving for Sporting Purposes in Turkish Territorial Waters, published on 3 March 1990, issue 20450. The 2011 tourism regulation points straight at it, so it governs a commercial dive in Antalya as much as a private one.

Its numbers are blunt. The depth limit for sport scuba diving is 30 metres. Training lifts it to 42 metres and no further. Dives past 30 metres require medical personnel and equipment to be present. Decompression dives are forbidden outright, and the limits written on a diver’s certificate may not be exceeded.

The kit list is prescriptive too. A buoyancy compensator, a tank pressure gauge, a depth gauge and a timer are compulsory. Lifting bags are prohibited. Dives run in buddy pairs, a flagged dive buoy is mandatory, and night diving is allowed only as training under an instructor and only with prior permission.

Foreign divers carry two extra requirements. Article 7 makes every scuba dive by a foreign national subject to permission from the provincial tourism directorate or a body it authorises, with one copy of the form to the harbour master and one to the regional coast guard command. Article 9 requires foreign nationals to dive accompanied by a Turkish guide diver, who carries the responsibility for antiquities during the dive.

Article 17 is the one that reaches furthest. Touching archaeological and cultural values, damaging them or disturbing their position is prohibited, and lifting cultural or natural property from the seabed is prohibited even if the intention is to show it to museum officials. What you may do is report it. Nothing else.

The 2016 decision that closes water, and where its boxes fall

The other half of the system sits in the Act on the Conservation of Cultural and Natural Property No. 2863 of 21 July 1983. Article 35 says that the underwater areas holding cultural and natural property in need of protection are identified by the ministry and published by decision, and that decision closes them.

The instrument in force is decision 2016/8743 of 5 April 2016, published in the Resmî Gazete of 20 May 2016, issue 29717. Its Article 1 reads plainly: inside the areas whose limits are shown on the annexed maps and coordinate lists, no diving may take place other than for scientific purposes. It repealed three earlier decisions from 2001 and 2002.

Article 1 has a second limb that matters for eastern Antalya. Along the entire Black Sea coast and along the shore from Alanya to the Syrian border, diving other than scientific diving is barred at the shores of archaeological sites until the survey of underwater cultural property in those waters is complete. Alanya is an Antalya district, so the province is caught by both limbs.

The Mediterranean annex is a list of coordinate corners in WGS 84, numbered A1 to A21, with corner points marked Sahil where a box reaches the shoreline. Ten of them, A11 to A20, fall between 29°21' and 30°31' east and between 36°07' and 36°24' north. Put that band on a chart and it is the western Antalya coast: Kalkan, Kaş, the Kekova archipelago, Demre, Finike, Cape Gelidonya and Olympos.

The list then jumps. After A20 at 30°30' east the next entry, A21, sits at 35°56' east, off Hatay. Between those two longitudes there is no numbered closed box at all, which covers the Kemer coast, the Gulf of Antalya, Side and Alanya.

Two more articles are worth carrying. Article 2 obliges a diver who comes across cultural property in need of protection, inside a reopened area or outside the closed ones, to notify the nearest civil authority or museum, and forbids any intervention in the meantime. Article 3 puts the closed areas on nautical charts published by the navy’s Office of Navigation, Hydrography and Oceanography.

How closed water gets reopened: a commission and a 100-metre survey

A closed box is not closed forever. A regulation published on 20 March 2020, issue 31074, sets out how a tourism and sport diving area can be designated inside one.

Decisions are made by an Underwater Protection Commission of seven standing members: the deputy minister the directorate reports to; the Director General of Cultural Heritage and Museums; the Director General of Investments and Operations; the head of the Excavations Department; the head of the Marine Tourism Department; the director of the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology; and a member appointed by the Naval Forces Command.

The test is physical. Before any area can be designated, a team formed by the directorate general surveys the applied-for site and everything within 100 metres in every direction. The report must state whether visible cultural property is present, whether there is a conservation site on the adjoining land, the distance to protected underwater property, and the likely effect of diving on what lies on the seabed.

Commission decisions take effect on ministry approval, and designations of tourism and sport diving areas are announced on the ministry website. The same text routes buoy, pontoon and mooring requests through the identical survey.

The tourism side was brought into line on 25 May 2024, issue 32556. Before that date the 2011 regulation simply barred underwater sporting activity in conservation sites designated under Act 2863. The amended Article 14(4) now says diving for tourism and sport may take place at the sites the ministry designates inside those protected regions, and, with the defence ministry’s concurring opinion, inside military and security zones.

Kaş and Kekova: 257.83 square kilometres protected since 1990

The best-known diving in the province sits inside a protected area older than most of the rules above. Kaş-Kekova was declared a Special Environmental Protection Area by Council of Ministers decision 90/77 of 18 January 1990. The environment ministry puts it at 257.83 square kilometres, running from Uluburun east of Kaş to the Demre plain east of Kekova Burnu.

Its shape decides the diving. The shoreline is ringed by steep limestone that continues several hundred metres down below the surface, there is no sand beach along it, and the sheltered coves are shingle. Because land access barely exists, almost every diver goes in from a boat. Kekova is the largest island; İç Ada, Toprak Adası, Aşırlı Ada and Kişnali Ada sit around it.

The ministry counts 28 dive points in the area and names Beş Adalar and Kanyon as the first among them. It puts the diving season at April to January, a long one, and singles out the islets on the submerged sill between Gata Burnu and Meis, which joins that island to the mainland underwater, as holding the most important dive points.

Two places are closed by name. Because of archaeological remains, diving is prohibited on the western shores of Gata Burnu and in Bohça İskelesi Koyu. The ministry also flags the cost of the rest: uncontrolled contact with the bottom damages algae and phanerogams, and dive boat waste overwhelms harbour facilities in the crowded summer.

What lives there has been counted since 2002: a thousand marine species, among them 117 fish species, 729 invertebrates and about 160 algae, with 33 species in the western part marked as conservation priorities. Posidonia oceanica and Cymodocea nodosa meadows act as nursery ground, which is why anchoring is the ministry’s stated worry. The population inside the protection area was about 8,000 in the 1970s and now runs above 56,000, doubling again in high summer. The Kaş operator list covers who works there.

Kemer and Tekirova: the Paris wreck and the Üç Adalar

Kemer is where the province puts its dive schools, and the provincial directorate says it holds more of them than anywhere else in the country. The wreck attached to it is the Paris, a French vessel lost in the First World War and thought to have been built in 1896, lying on sand about 1.5 kilometres off Kemer yacht harbour.

Its depth is given twice, in the same document. The directorate’s Kemer section places the Paris on a sandy bottom at 33 metres; its own entry for the wreck a few paragraphs later says 25 metres. Both figures come from the same provincial page and they do not agree. She has three decks and two holds, with shells fused together in the holds and a tiled section amidships.

Off Tekirova, south of Kemer, sit the Üç Adalar, the Three Islands, roughly 45 minutes from Kemer marina by boat. The directorate rates the bottom there as richer than the city’s, with a range of depths, good visibility, a canyon holding large rays, and caves. The same islands appear in its text under the name İç Adalar.

Seasonal animals are named rather than promised. In August and September the directorate reports schools of bluefin tuna at the islands, with monk seal sightings possible and dolphins possible in coastal water at any time. None of that is a guarantee for a given week.

Antalya city: diving off a tufa cliff, Sıçan Adası and the Sosyete wreck

The city itself is built on a carbonate plateau, and the plateau stops at the sea in a wall. At the Lower Düden waterfall, southeast of the centre, the water drops into the Mediterranean from cliffs 40 metres high. The upper falls, about 10 kilometres northeast of the centre, drop 20 metres, and Kırkgöz is their main source.

The rock is not what it is usually called. A study of these deposits concluded that the Antalya carbonates, long described as travertine, should be termed tufa: biogenic, laid down in cool water rather than hot. It also found the morphology of the tufa coastal cliffs is controlled by sea erosion, the terracing mostly cut rather than original.

That is the wall divers enter beneath. Between Lara and Konyaaltı the directorate describes points suitable for shore entry, with the cliff formations running from 14 metres down to 25 metres and the first 20 metres the part worth seeing. The favoured way in is the foot of the road down to Konyaaltı beach, where the rock reaches 25 metres.

Sıçan Adası, a few kilometres from Antalya harbour, splits in two. The west side facing the shore is shallow, a maximum of 8 metres over sand. The northeast side is rock down to 22 metres with a small cave on the eastern flank. Wind on that side raises no waves but does drive strong surface current with its strength, and the island is busy with day boats.

The city wreck needs paperwork. The Sosyete wreck, the San Didier, is a French ship sunk in 1942 about a kilometre off the Antalya yacht harbour, under a buoy, with ammunition and desert vehicles still inside after salvage in 1946 and 1974. Diving it requires permission from the Antalya Governorship and the Marine Police Branch Directorate, and the harbour mouth nearby is busy.

Two caves round out the province’s own list. Gök Mağarası at Finike is described by the directorate as one of the deepest dived caves in Asia, with fresh water leaving the cave and mixing with seawater below 15 metres. Suluin, inland at Kırkgöz, was surveyed in 1995 to 83 metres, with a large chamber at about 45 metres walled in stalactites and travertine pools.

The B-24 off Manavgat, and a year that does not add up

The most-told wreck in the province lies 200 metres offshore near Manavgat: a B-24 Liberator named Hadley’s Harem. The provincial directorate says the aircraft was returning from a bombing mission over Romania, heading for its base in Cyprus, and that recovery work in 1995 brought the cockpit to the surface.

The date on that page is 1944. The American low-level raid on the Ploiești oil refineries in Romania, Operation Tidal Wave, was flown on 1 August 1943 by 178 B-24 Liberators, of which 52 were shot down and 310 airmen killed. The two accounts do not agree, and the 1944 year in the provincial text is not supported by the raid it describes.

The wreck is not an open dive either way. The directorate states plainly that diving the aircraft requires special permission. A B-24 Liberator now stands in the aviation collection of the Rahmi M. Koç Museum in Istanbul. Our wreck diving list covers coasts built around this kind of dive.

Sea temperature on this coast, 1970 to 2024

The Turkish State Meteorological Service keeps an official sea water temperature series for the Mediterranean running from 1970 to 2024. Its monthly means give the shape of the year: 16.7°C in January, a low of 16.0°C in February, 18.1 in April, 23.9 in June, 26.7 in July, a peak of 28.1°C in August, 27.0 in September and 18.5 in December.

The whole-period mean is 21.5°C. The warmest year in the record is 2019 at 23.8°C, the coldest 1992 at 20.6°C. Read that against a February figure of 16.0 and the planning point is clear: this is a warm-temperate winter, not a tropical one, and the travel wetsuit guide covers the trade-off between a 5 mm and a 3 mm.

The trend is in the same file, cut into five equal periods. The mean was 21.0°C from 1970 to 1980, 21.1 from 1981 to 1991, 21.4 from 1992 to 2002, 21.9 from 2003 to 2013 and 22.3°C from 2014 to 2024. That is 1.3 degrees between the first block and the last.

One limit on those numbers: the series covers the Turkish Mediterranean coast as a whole, not an Antalya station, so it gives the regional shape rather than a reading off Konyaaltı. The protected-area season at Kaş and Kekova, April to January, is the local answer to the same curve.

Nine dive businesses in Antalya, and what the registers carry

Our own count is small and uniform. The Antalya operator list holds 9 businesses, read on 4 September 2026. All 9 are published by SSI in its register of affiliated centres, which is unusual for a coast this size.

The other registers are empty here. None of the nine appears in the IKO register, none in the VDWS register, and none is a Green Fins member, so there is no in-person environmental assessment behind any entry on this coast. Six of the nine publish a website in the SSI register; three do not.

The filing is worth knowing before you search for a business yourself. The register files 6 of the 9 under “ANTALYA” and 3 under “Antalya”, so every entry carries the province name rather than the town it works from, so searching that register by town, for Kemer or Tekirova or Konyaaltı, turns up none of them.

That is also why the permit question cannot be answered from a register. The SSI entry records a training affiliation. The document that lets a business take paying customers into the water in this province is the governor’s permit, or the marine tourism vehicle operator certificate that replaces it at sea, and neither is published as a list.