Alanya rewrites the conservation plan for its castle: historic Greek houses to be protected and opened to visitors

Turkey's Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change and Alanya Municipality have begun joint work on a new conservation plan for Alanya Castle. The documents the historic peninsula still lives by were drawn up by hand in 1988 and 1999: plot boundaries overlap on them, and owners have spent years unable to establish where one property ends and the next begins. Along the stretch from Ehmedek to Tophane the discrepancies will be resolved from scratch, through geological surveys and precise modern measurement.

A separate strand of the project covers the abandoned Greek houses inside the castle walls. They were left out of the earlier plans and spent decades without protected status; now these buildings are being brought under protection and prepared for tourism use. Eighty per cent of the costly design work will be covered by YİKOB, the investment monitoring and coordination directorate of the Antalya governorate, after the municipality's application met the required criteria. The work is led by Mayor Osman Tarık Özçelik, and the tender is expected within the coming months.

Alanya Castle is the city's calling card: 6.5 kilometres of walls, around 140 towers, and a place on UNESCO's World Heritage Tentative List since 2000. For the property market, the practical side matters most here. Clear plot boundaries in the historic core remove legal risk from transactions, while restored houses and growing visitor numbers add value to the central districts. Alanya is putting in order not only its roads and promenades but also the paperwork that ownership rests on — a signal worth reading alongside the sales statistics.