Find your bearings
‘Bodrum’, to its regulars, is not precisely the town itself – rather, the name refers to the peninsula at large. On this coastal finger, you need to know where to go. Bodrum Town is where you can let off steam at night, where the club singers croon and corks pop across the shiny marina, and where summering show-offs swarm the boulevards. Beyond the town, quieter villages hug the northern, more exclusive shoreline, where you’ll find Mandarin Oriental, Bodrum.
Feed your mind
Bodrum Castle was built by crusaders around 1402, from the ruins of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, long since dismantled (much is in the British Museum). It was reborn in 1962 as the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology, and has the world's biggest Eastern Mediterranean amphora collection, as well as exquisite relics from shipwrecks around the Turkish Aegean.