Cappadocia
A landscape people spent centuries carving houses, churches and whole cities into
- When to go
- October 12° · 4 rainy days
- Per day
- €€€price 3 of 5
- How many days
- 2–3days
- For you
- 6 questions →
- Nearest airport
- 29 km Nevşehir · 60 km Kayseri
- Right now
Cappadocia needs two to three days, because the sunrise balloon flight most people come for is often cancelled by wind. The rest — valleys of stone cones, churches cut into rock and underground cities — is done on foot and by car from Göreme. Volcanoes made the rock: their ash hardened into soft tuff, which wind and water carved into cones that people then dug into for houses and churches.
Every morning Turkey's civil aviation authority (SHGM) decides on flights after checking the wind, and when it says no, nobody flies. So plan at least two mornings and book the first, leaving the second as a fallback. The flight lasts about an hour and costs €150–450 per person, most from April to June and in September and October. If you'd rather not pay, the same scene is there from below: from the terraces above Göreme at dawn you see every balloon at once.
Göreme is the base because the valleys around it are within walking distance, and Uçhisar is two and a half kilometres away. The underground cities lie to the south — Kaymaklı about twenty and Derinkuyu about thirty kilometres in a straight line — so you reach them by car or on a tour, and that is a day you don't combine with hiking.
What to see in Cappadocia
A balloon flight
They collect you from your hotel before dawn, and baskets take around twenty passengers — a smaller basket costs more.
Göreme Open Air Museum
Rock-cut churches with frescoes mostly from the tenth and eleventh centuries, part of Göreme National Park, on the UNESCO list since 1985. Entry is €20; the Dark Church, with the best-preserved frescoes, is ticketed separately.
Derinkuyu underground city
About 85 metres deep, with eight levels open to visitors, stables, a chapel, kitchens and ventilation shafts; it could shelter up to twenty thousand people. The passages are low and narrow — not for anyone who dislikes tight spaces.
The valleys on foot
Love, Rose and Red valleys, on marked paths past abandoned rock churches. Linking Rose and Red valleys takes two and a half to four hours, depending on where you start.
Uçhisar
A rock about sixty metres high, hollowed into a castle and visible from all around. From the top you look over the valleys around Göreme.
Two things you probably did not know
The pillars called fairy chimneys formed because a hard basalt cap sheltered the soft volcanic ash beneath it from erosion. Once the cap falls, the pillar crumbles within a few decades.
Derinkuyu is an underground city of eighteen levels, some eighty metres deep, where up to twenty thousand people could hide with their livestock. It was found by accident in 1963, when a man knocking down a wall in his house discovered a passage behind it.
Ready for Cappadocia?
Within reach from here
Places sorted by straight-line distance from Cappadocia — day trips or weekends.
Turkey
→Istanbul, then one direction: Cappadocia by plane, Ephesus and Pamukkale by train, or the Lycian coast by bus
Greece
→The north by road, the Cyclades by ferry, Rhodes by air — pick the region first and the island second
Serbia
→The north an hour away by train, the mountains three or four by car — Serbia divides by the time you have
All 277 places we write about sit on one page — narrow them down by continent, country, price or what you are travelling for.
Within reach from here: Safranbolu, Antalya and Pamukkale
See how much of that actually suits you — or pin Cappadocia if you have been.
Front row for the next trip
Leave your email and we'll let you know when a new destination or story goes up.