From SohajPedia, the daily world briefing
Antalya
Antalya is where Türkiye's mountains drop into the Mediterranean and where, each year, more foreign visitors arrive than almost anywhere else on the planet. In November 2026 the resort city also became a diplomatic one: the world's climate negotiators gathered at the Antalya Expo Center for COP31, the UN climate conference.
Antalya in numbers
Foreign visitors (millions)
In November 2026 the city also hosts COP31 — the UN climate conference — putting its own coastline at the centre of the climate conversation.
Where and what it is
Antalya stands on Türkiye's south-western Mediterranean coast, at the head of the gulf that shares its name, backed by the Taurus Mountains. It is the capital of Antalya Province and one of the country's largest cities — around 1.5 million people in the urban area, 2.72 million across the province. The old town, Kaleiçi, is a knot of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman streets above a Roman harbour; around it spreads a modern city of boulevards, and along the coast in both directions, one of the densest concentrations of resort hotels in the world.
A short history
The city began as Attaleia, founded around 200 BC by King Attalus II of Pergamon, whose name it still carries in altered form. Rome took it, Byzantium held it, and after a Seljuk and then Ottoman succession it became Turkish — with each era leaving a layer: Hadrian's Gate, built for a Roman emperor's visit, still stands in the old town's streets, near minarets from the Seljuk centuries. For most of that long history it was a modest port. The transformation came in the late twentieth century, when Türkiye bet on mass tourism and Antalya's coast — beaches, ruins and 300 days of sun a year — turned out to be exactly what northern Europe wanted.
The tourism machine
The scale is hard to overstate. Euromonitor ranked Antalya the fourth most visited city in the world in 2023, with more than 16.5 million foreign visitors; in 2025 the number rose to 18.6 million — more than twelve visitors a year for every resident. The beaches in the photograph above, Konyaaltı's long pebble shore under the cliffs, are the everyday version of the product: clear water, mountain backdrop, and a promenade that fills at sunset.
Antalya and COP31
In 2026 Antalya added conferences to sunbathing. The city hosts COP31, the 31st UN climate change conference, from 9 to 20 November 2026 at the Antalya Expo Center — Türkiye's first time hosting the summit, with its environment minister Murat Kurum as president and Australia's Chris Bowen presiding over negotiations. Tens of thousands of delegates in a city built for millions of tourists is, logistically, the easy part; what they agree about the planet is the harder story, followed in SohajPedia's COP31 briefing.
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Photograph: Konyaaltı Beach, Antalya, via Wikimedia Commons.