Butterfly Valley is a canyon on the Lycian coast of Türkiye with no road to it at all. Walls of some 350 metres drop to a single pebble beach at its mouth. The ways in are a twenty-minute boat crossing from Ölüdeniz, or a steep rope-assisted scramble down the cliff from Faralya, the village on the plateau. From out at sea the cove stays hidden. It appears only as the boat turns in. It is a first-degree natural site, which rules out permanent building, so what stands on the shingle is tents, wooden huts and a café. The cliffs take the wind out of the air, and the water below them lies flat. Swimming out far enough to turn around opens the canyon above you, a green cleft splitting the whole face of the mountain.
Following the creek inland takes you under figs, oleander and plane trees until the walls rear up and the sky narrows to a strip. Half an hour on stones and roots brings you to the lower falls; the last stretch leaves the bed and goes up wet, polished rock on fixed ropes to a cold pool in permanent shade. The insect the place is named for is in there with you, and it is doing nothing. Jersey tigers fly by day and spend most of their time sitting completely still, packed together on shaded rock and the undersides of leaves where the running stream keeps the air humid. At rest one looks like a scrap of striped bark. The scarlet is underneath, shown only when the wings move, and it is a warning rather than decoration: the moth is distasteful to birds, and the flare of red makes a predator hesitate. It is the only butterfly or moth the European Union lists as a priority species. The valley has carried its name for barely fifty years, since a photographer publicised the insects at the end of the 1970s. They had been sitting out the Mediterranean summer in this gorge long before anyone thought to call the place after them.