Düden Waterfall is one river with two waterfalls in the city of Antalya, on the Mediterranean coast of Türkiye: at Upper Düden the river drops twenty metres into a cave that can be walked behind in a park of plane trees, and ten kilometres on, at Lower Düden, it falls forty metres off a cliff straight into the sea, watched from the clifftop at Lara and from the boats that leave the old harbour. The river rises from the karst springs of Kırkgöz below the Taurus and has built the ground it falls from, since the lime dropped out of its water over hundreds of thousands of years made a plateau of travertine 630 square kilometres wide, and Antalya stands on it; the Greeks named the river Katarrhaktes, the cataract, the word behind the English one, and the lower fall's other name, Karpuzkaldıran, the watermelon lifter, is said to be meant literally, for the fruit the spray threw up. At Upper Düden stone steps drop from the park into the cave the falling water carved for itself, with the curtain of water in front and the light green through it, and a railed walkway runs along the rock wall above the stream through ivy and shade.
The lower fall is the one the city shows off, on the cliffs of Lara beside the beach hotels, where the river reaches the last of its travertine and tips over into open sea with the spray blowing back over the clifftop terraces and the tea gardens, and the boats out of Kaleiçi track the cliffs until the fall comes into view head-on, the only angle that shows the full forty metres from lip to water. In spring the snowmelt off the Taurus recharges the springs and both falls run at full width, with the lower one taking the whole river over the edge, and in late summer the upper fall thins as the water is drawn off for the city. Düden is a river that falls twice, and the second time it falls into the Mediterranean.