Walking Bodrum Town: Old Bazaar, Kumbahçe, Marina and Boatyards

Unlike high-rise Mediterranean resort towns, Bodrum Town enforced a strict municipal building code decades ago inspired by writer Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı (The Fisherman of Halicarnassus): buildings are capped at two storeys, plastered in blinding lime whitewash to reflect the Aegean sun, and accented with indigo-blue or green window frames (originally painted blue because locals believed the pigment repelled scorpions and mosquitoes). Walking the full waterfront horseshoe from east to west takes just forty-five minutes on flat pavements.

The Eastern Bay: Çarşı (Old Bazaar), Kumbahçe and Zeki Müren Museum

Start at the base of Bodrum Castle, where the bronze bust of the Fisherman of Halicarnassus greets visitors on Kale Caddesi. Behind the waterfront spreads the shaded, vine-covered grid of the Old Bazaar (Bodrum Çarşısı) along Cumhuriyet Caddesi and Dr Alim Bey Caddesi, famous for custom handmade leather Bodrum sandals (Bodrum sandaleti), natural sea sponges, blue evil-eye glass beads and linen shirts. Step two blocks uphill into the quiet pedestrian lanes around Uslu Sokak and Sanat Okulu Sokak to photograph whitewashed stone cottages draped in bougainvillea.

Continuing east along the seafront promenade of Kumbahçe (where dining tables sit right on the pebble beach looking back at the floodlit Castle at night) brings you to the Zeki Müren Art Museum (Zeki Müren Sanat Müzesi) at the end of the bay. Housed in the two-storey house where Turkey's legendary "Sun of Art" singer and composer Zeki Müren (1931 to 1996) spent his final years, it displays his flamboyant stage costumes, letters, paintings and garden Buick.

The Western Bay: Neyzen Tevfik Caddesi, Milta Marina and İçmeler Boatyards

Walk west from the Castle past the 1723 Mustafa Paşa Mosque and the 18th-century stone cistern and shipyard tower of the Ottoman Shipyard (Osmanlı Tersanesi) (now a quiet public park and art gallery with old Ottoman tombstones under palm trees) along Neyzen Tevfik Caddesi. Lined with wooden gulets moored stern-to along the quay and traditional fish taverns, the avenue leads to Milta Bodrum Marina. If you continue 10 minutes past Kumbahçe on the eastern coast road toward İçmeler, you can still smell freshly cut pine and mahogany inside the open-air Bodrum Gulet Shipyards (Tersaneler), where master shipwrights build 30-metre wooden schooners by eye and hand.