How Iztuzu Beach Was Saved, and Who Saved It

Iztuzu is four and a half kilometres of sand with no hotel on it, no road along it and no building at either end except a cafe and a research station. On a Turkish coast that is not normal, and it did not happen by itself.

In 1987 a large hotel was planned on this beach. The reason it was not built is a campaign that ran for a few years, involved a handful of unlikely people and ended with the whole area declared protected.

What was planned

The site was a stretch of sand that happens to be one of the most important loggerhead turtle nesting beaches in the Mediterranean. The development proposed was a luxury hotel with the infrastructure that goes with one.

Turtles nest at night and hatchlings navigate toward the brightest horizon. A lit hotel on a nesting beach is not a neighbour; it is a replacement.

The plan had approval. This was not a rumour campaign against a hypothetical; the thing was going ahead.

Who stopped it

The name most associated with it is June Haimoff, an English woman who had first come to this coast by boat in the mid-1970s and settled in Dalyan in 1984. Local people called her Kaptan June, and the name stuck for the rest of her life.

She was not alone. The campaign brought in the botanist and broadcaster David Bellamy, and conservationists including Lily Venizelos, Peter Gunther, Nergis Yazgan and Keith Corbett, who between them turned a local planning row into an international story.

The decisive moment came when the Duke of Edinburgh, then president of the World Wide Fund for Nature, called for a halt. The development was suspended, and in 1988 the beach and its hinterland were declared a protected area.

What protection actually means here

These rules are the campaign, written down. Following them is not bureaucracy; it is the thing that keeps the beach the way you found it.

• No building on the beach and no road running along it.
• Access closed between 20:00 and 08:00 during the nesting season.
• Marked nests fenced and monitored through the season.
• Umbrellas and furniture restricted to defined zones, away from the nesting strip.
• No vehicles, no digging and nothing left behind at the end of the day.

What you can see today

At the road end of the beach there is a sea turtle research and rescue centre, where injured animals are treated and where the public can see the work being done.

June Haimoff's old wooden beach hut has been brought back to Iztuzu and now serves as a small information centre and museum. It is a modest building and the story inside it is not.

And then there is the beach itself, which is the actual monument: four and a half kilometres of sand that somebody decided not to sell.

The woman, briefly

June Haimoff was born in 1922 and died in 2022, aged ninety-nine. She spent close to forty years in Dalyan and most of them on this issue.

A foundation carrying her name was set up in 2011 to continue the conservation work, and she was still campaigning in her nineties.

It is worth saying plainly that she was a visitor who stayed, not a local, and that the campaign succeeded because Turkish conservationists and scientists were in it too. Both halves of that sentence matter.

Why this belongs on a boat trip page

Because the day cruise ends at Iztuzu, and the thing that makes the afternoon good is the thing that nearly did not survive.

Every boat that lands at the river end of the beach is using a protected area, and the rules on the sand exist because of a specific fight in the late 1980s rather than as general good manners.

Knowing that changes how the stop feels. An empty beach is pleasant; an empty beach that was fought for is interesting.

What a visitor can do now

None of that is demanding. It is the minimum the beach asks in return for being what it is.

1. Keep off marked nests and keep dogs off the beach entirely.
2. Take every piece of litter back with you, including the small things that blow away.
3. Use no lights on the sand after dark in the nesting season, and respect the closure.
4. Do not ask a boat crew to approach a turtle for a photograph.
5. Visit the information centre at the road end if you are curious. It costs almost nothing and funds the work.

The counterfactual

Picture the alternative honestly: a hotel at the river end, lights along the dune, a road behind the sand and loungers from end to end. It would have been a perfectly good beach resort, and there are dozens of them on this coast.

What there is instead is one of the last large undeveloped nesting beaches in the Mediterranean, reachable only by boat or a single road to one corner of it.

That is what a handful of people bought with a few years of their lives, and it is still there every afternoon when the boats come down the river.