Saklıkent Gorge is a fissure eighteen kilometres long in the Taurus mountains of Muğla province, in southwestern Türkiye, near Fethiye, with walls close to 300 metres high closing to two metres apart, and it is waded upstream from its mouth through ice-cold water that bursts from the rock, a slot so narrow that the sun reaches its floor only at midday. The gorge was cut by the Karaçay stream through the limestone of Akdağ, and not all of it from above, since part of it is a collapsed cave; a boardwalk pinned to the cliff leads in from the mouth over the river to the springs where the water comes out of the rock, and from there the visitor is in the water, six to eight metres of fast, thigh-deep current with a rope to hold, then calf-deep for a few hundred metres up the slot between walls that lean together overhead, where the current slackens and fine grey clay settles in the shallows, smeared on by the crowds. The name means hidden city, and the gorge was found by a shepherd looking for a lost goat in the 1980s, when it opened as the region's coolest day out from the beaches of Ölüdeniz and Kaş.
At the mouth low wooden platforms sit directly above the running water, where trout and gözleme are eaten cross-legged on cushions with the cold air of the gorge coming down over the tables, and beyond the point where the wading stops the fourteen kilometres that walkers never see belong to the canyoning teams, roped down waterfalls and swum through pools on guided trips. From June the meltwater of Akdağ has passed and the stream drops to calf depth, opening the slot; before that it fills the gorge and the way in is shut. The ridge above the same valley carries Tlos, a Lycian city whose tombs are cut into the cliff face, and the Xanthos river below runs rafts. Saklıkent is a crack in a mountain with a river in it, and the walk in is done wet.