Kurşunlu Waterfall depends on a stream that the people upstream also depend on. The water rises at the Gelingöz spring four kilometres away, and the villages along that stretch — Kurşunlu, Yurtpınar, Fettahlı and Topallı — pump the same groundwater into their greenhouses, through what the park's operator puts at roughly 3,000 unlicensed wells. In dry years the 18-metre cascade has shrunk until the water only dripped from two points in the rock. When the stream runs properly it does more than fall: it carries dissolved lime, and where it froths over the edge that lime hardens back into a rock called travertine. So the ledge is built by the waterfall itself and grows a little every year, and the two-kilometre canyon below is cut through the travertine that earlier flows left behind. At the foot of the drop the water rests in a pool the locals call Nilüfer, the water lily, then steps down a chain of seven small pools.
The canyon opens in the middle of a sun-scorched plain and is roofed by red pine, so the air cools within a few steps of the path leaving the heat. Laurel and pine close overhead until the water is the only loud thing left. Behind the main cascade the rock is hollowed out, and you can stand inside the hollow and look back out through the falling water. Terrapins haul out on the warm stones at the pool edges, mallards work the shallows, and the gorge holds its damp coolness through the worst of the Antalya summer. The site opened to visitors in 1986 and was declared a nature park on 21 May 1991, and around 400,000 people a year now come, more than to any other nature park in Antalya province. How much water they find depends on the season: the cascade is at its widest in late winter and spring and at its thinnest at the end of summer.