Berke Ranch

[Siyabend]

A riding and holiday club set at the foot of the Taurus Mountains, Berke is oriented away from the sea and the great tourist-processing centres of Kemer’s beaches. The focus of the scenery is the Twin Rocks, a spectacular pair of granite towers that seem geologically unrelated to the mountains around them. Behind them rise the 2400-metre peaks of the Lycian Olympus. Endless gardens of orange cover the lowland, slowly gnawed at the edges by the greedy bunkers of the newly rich.

Spread over the spacious grounds of the ranch are a low-lying main building, several two-storey villas, a fancy ’Honeymoon Suite’, a fine restaurant, a large swimming pool, and the horses’ quarters. The style aspires to be elegant in a scaled-down version of Antalya’s highly professionalised holiday establishments. There are lots of horses, with riding instructors who experts tell us are very good, and excursion leaders fluent in many languages. They organise four-to-seven day riding tours into remote parts of the mountain country.

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