İnsuyu Cave, Turkey’s first cave that opened to tourism, hosted 65,000 people last year, while this figure was 114,000 in 2019.
The number of visitors in the ancient city of Kibyra increased last year compared to 2019. While 15,000 people visited Kibyra in 2019, this number reached 22,000 last year.
The first stop for holidaymakers in the city is the Burdur Archeology Museum, which was established in 1969. More than 57,000 works from the Persian, classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman periods and nearly 4,000 ethnographic works adorn the museum.
The museum hosted 35,000 people in 2019, but this figure dropped down to just 8,000 in 2020 due to the measures taken in line with the pandemic. Another stop for holidaymakers in Burdur, the smallest city of the Western Mediterranean region, is the ancient city of Sagalassos in Ağlasun.
A fountain named after the Antonines, a family of Roman emperors who built it in 160-180 A.D in the ancient city, is one of the most fascinating places to visit. In the Antonines Fountain, the natural spring water, once drawn from Ağlasun Mountain by ancient waterways, still continues to flow like a small waterfall today.
‘City of Gladiators‘
The magnificent fountain in the north of the Upper Agora is 28 meters in length and 9 meters in height. In front of the fountain, there is an 81-cubic-meter pool made of seven different colored stones. Excavation and restoration work started in the fountain in 1998, and it started operating again in 2010. Though the originals of the four sculptures unearthed during the excavations are exhibited in the Burdur Archeology Museum, their exact imitations were placed in the fountain.
People who visit often drink water from the fountain, which is thought to have been built by Titus Flavius Severanus Neon and his wife, the most important benefactor of Sagalassos.
While 80,000 local and foreign tourists visited the ancient city of Sagalassos in 2019, this number was 42,000 in 2020 due to the negative impact of the pandemic. The 2,300-year-old Kibyra, also known as the “City of Gladiators,” draws attention with its gigantic monumental structures. The city is home to Turkey’s longest ancient friezes depicting the gladiators.
65,000 people visited
The city has a stadium with a capacity of 10,000 people, built in the Roman and Byzantine architectural traditions. Apart from the late Roman bath, agoras, main street, a huge theater for 9,000 people and underground chamber tombs, it is also home to an orchestra section covered with Medusa mosaic, which is unique in the world. The ancient city, which entered the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2016, welcomed 15,000 people in 2019 and 22,000 people in 2020.
Located 13 kilometers away from Burdur, İnsuyu Cave is a 597-meter horizontal cave that opened to tourism in 1965 on the Burdur-Antalya highway. The stalactites and stalagmites, which were formed as a result of the melting and erosion of the Karstic structure over time, attract the attention of visitors the most. Around 114,000 people visited the caves in 2019, but due to the negative impact of the pandemic, the caves entertained some 65,000 people last year.
