Butterfly Valley is a roadless canyon on the Lycian coast of Türkiye, in Muğla province south of Ölüdeniz, walls of 350 metres dropping to a single beach of pebbles at the mouth, where Jersey tiger moths gather in their thousands in the damp shade of the gorge each summer, and it is reached by boat from Ölüdeniz in twenty minutes or by a rope-assisted path down the cliff from the village of Faralya. The valley is the mouth of a stream off Babadağ, the mountain of the paragliders, and its beach is a cove of coarse pebbles where the cliffs cut the wind and the sea sits flat and clear, walled on three sides; the streambed leads inland from the beach under figs, oleander and plane trees until the walls rear up and the sky is a strip overhead, to two waterfalls at the canyon's head that run strongest in spring and thin to a thread by late summer, and in the shade along the stream the moths sit completely still, since the insect that made the valley famous flies by day and at rest looks like a scrap of striped bark, showing the red of its hindwings only when it flies, a warning that it is not to be eaten. The moths gather from late June to early September, thickest in July and August, clustered motionless on the shaded rock and leaves.
The valley was a commune of tents and wooden huts for decades, run by the people who kept the beach free of building, and it is a protected site now with camping and a few bungalows, day boats arriving mid-morning and leaving mid-afternoon, so that the evening belongs to the campers and the goats on the cliffs. Fethiye is not the only valley built on this moth, since Rhodes has its own Petaloudes, and the Lycian Way passes above on its way along the coast. Butterfly Valley is a slot in the cliffs with a beach at the bottom, and the moths hold their meeting in its shade.