İçmeler İçmeler is a Turkish holiday resort and municipality located 8 kilometers from Marmaris. İçmeler Bay is located on the Datça Peninsula. The town is surrounded on three sides by pristine pine forests. Trekking in the mountains offers spectacular views of the area and is a very popular activity for tourists. The town has grown extremely quickly over the past 15 years with hotel accommodation and other tourism amenities developing across this quiet fishing and sponge divers village. With increasing tourism, the village is also enjoying an increasing amount of watersports such as scuba diving, waterskiing and others. The town developed to meet an increasing demand of tourists seeking a quieter alternative to the overdeveloped party town of Marmaris. Hence, the nightlife is rather scarce in İçmeler with the restaurants and pubs usually featuring live music up until about midnight. After midnight, the only entertainment available will generally be found in the nightclubs, such as the popular nightclubs like EastEnders and Ambiance. These feature foam parties, music and dancing and become increasingly busy between midnight and 1:30am. Many tourists enjoy starting their night out in the restaurants in the early evening, moving onto the pubs and mini-discos until midnight, and then going off to the nightclubs up until 4am in the morning.
Directly across the bay from İçmeler is the holiday resort and port of Marmaris. Marmaris derived its name from Marmara, which is the name for marble of which Turkey has in abundance. There are extensive marble quarrys nearby between Muğla and Bodrum. As the total number of restaurants and bars in Marmaris doubled each year, serving some 3 million tourists a year, visitors started looking for something a little more quiet. Meanwhile, İçmeler was just a place to go and be able to see the village life in Turkey. Hotel development got bigger as more tourists came to see İçmeler. Marti was the only holiday resort at the time, and it was known for it's quiet natural location. Much of this has changed in the 10 years from 1990 to 2000 with many hotels, apartments, restaurants, bars, shops and other tourism facilities being built. İçmeler is now a first-class resort that is big enough to serve everyone's needs yet small enough that everyone visiting or working in the resort felt like they were neigbours.
Many activities are available in İçmeler or nearby the town such as bicycling, motorbiking, surfing, jet skiing, parasailing, trekking, city tours and simply laying by a pool and sunbathing are very popular. However, boat trips to bays around Icmeler, Marmaris and Turunç are some of the most preferred excursions. There are also numerous other enjoyable daily excursions available such as scuba diving, horseback riding and quad biking.
İçmeler
