Ölüdeniz Blue Lagoon is a lagoon on the Turkish coast near Fethiye, in Muğla province, held still by a sandbar of pine and white sand beneath the 1,969-metre mountain of Babadağ, which falls almost sheer to the sea and makes the beach below it one of the busiest paragliding landing sites in the world. The name means dead sea, for the stillness: walled off from the waves by the Kumburnu spit, the lagoon sits mirror-flat and pool-warm over a visible sandy floor, shallow and gentle enough for hesitant swimmers, its colour shading from turquoise at the edge to deep blue at the mouth, and it looks closed but is not, since water moves through it all the time; the sandbar has been a first-degree protected natural site since 1978, decades before the tourist boom, which is why it still carries pines and picnic tables rather than buildings, with an entry fee at the gate. The view that made it famous is from the switchbacks of the descent road from Fethiye, where lay-bys open the whole basin, the lagoon, the spit, the long beach of Belcekız and the mountain behind, and the paragliders drifting down over all of it.
The paragliding is the mountain's gift. A cable car and a road climb Babadağ to launch decks between 1,700 and 1,900 metres, where tandem pilots clip passengers into a harness and run off the edge, and the flight is half an hour of gliding over the sea and the lagoon with the coast spread from Fethiye to the Greek islands, landing on the beach promenade among the cafés; thousands fly on a summer day, and the sky over the bay is full of canopies from morning to dusk. Boats run from the beach to the Butterfly Valley, a canyon on the coast reached only from the water, and the Lycian Way long-distance trail begins on the slope above the lagoon, walked to the ghost village of Kayaköy. Ölüdeniz is a lagoon under a mountain, and the sky between them is where the crowd is.