Reawaken Your Radiance: A Wellness Retreat on Turkey’s Turquoise Coast

As my plane touched down at Dalaman Airport on my first visit to Turkey, I had little idea what was waiting beyond the darkness.

The drive south carried us through Fethiye and towards Ölüdeniz beneath a night sky that concealed the mountains, pine forest and impossible shades of blue that define this stretch of Turkey's coast. By the time I reached Liberty Lykia Adults Only, it was past midnight. I was tired, hungry and still orientating myself to an unfamiliar landscape.

Yet there is something rather wonderful about arriving somewhere beautiful without being able to see it properly. I was welcomed with a glass of bubbly and found food still available despite the hour, before heading to my seventh-floor room and falling asleep with no real sense of where I was.

Morning provided the reveal.

Opening the curtains, there it was: mountains rising behind a sweep of pine forest, the Mediterranean extending towards the horizon and that particular clear turquoise water that gives this part of Turkey its name. The scent of pine mixed with warm sea air as I made my way outside for yoga beneath the trees.

It was less an arrival than a recalibration.

There is an interesting shift happening in wellness travel. We still want beautiful hotels, good food and somewhere lovely to swim, but increasingly we want to return from a holiday feeling different from when we left.

That doesn't necessarily mean signing ourselves into a clinical programme or spending a week in silence. Sometimes what we need is a softer intervention: movement in the morning, nourishing food, conversations that go beyond small talk, time outdoors and enough separation from everyday routines for something internal to begin to move.

Liberty Lykia offers an unusually effective backdrop for that style of retreat. The wider Liberty Lykia resort sits within what the hotel describes as 400 acres of untouched nature in Ölüdeniz, while its adults-only sister property occupies a quieter section beneath Babadağ with Mediterranean and mountain views.

My reason for coming, however, was more specific: the Bovisaj Reawaken Your Radiance retreat, an experience that explored the relationship between how we feel and how we present ourselves to the world. And that turned out to be far more interesting than a conventional retreat.

Bovisaj was founded around a holistic approach to face fitness and wellbeing, looking beyond skincare alone to explore facial movement, muscular patterns, expression and self-perception.

Its current philosophy remains centred around the idea of addressing beauty and wellbeing from the inside out. Bovisaj describes its in-person retreats as immersive experiences incorporating emotional wellbeing, self-image and personal reflection alongside its face-fitness practice. Its teaching team currently includes founder Leila alongside Loubaba, who is described by the company as a breathwork and face-yoga teacher. That philosophy was immediately apparent during our retreat.

The programme brought together women, men, couples and solo travellers, and rather than demanding transformation, it seemed to create conditions in which change might happen naturally. There were no austere rules or endless timetables. Instead, face fitness sat alongside yoga; meditation beside long lunches; breathwork alongside art therapy; hammam rituals beside evenings spent talking beneath the stars. Beauty became less about correcting something and more about reconnecting with it.

Ölüdeniz is one of Turkey's most recognisable coastal landscapes, but Liberty Lykia feels surprisingly removed from the bustle associated with a large Mediterranean resort.

Mountains rise almost directly from the water. Pines tumble towards the sea. Buildings sit among the landscape rather than entirely dominating it, and from numerous points around the property the Mediterranean appears unexpectedly through gaps in the trees.

The adults-only resort occupies the foothills of Babadağ, the mountain that towers over Ölüdeniz and has made the area famous for paragliding. Liberty also promotes access to walking on sections of the historic Lycian Way and offers activities including water sports, fitness facilities and tennis for those wanting a more active stay.

It gives the resort an unusual dual personality.

You can spend the morning barely moving beside an infinity pool and the afternoon hiking, swimming, canoeing or taking to the sky.

For me, however, its greatest asset was simply the landscape. Wellness here doesn't have to be programmed. Sometimes it is the five-minute walk beneath the trees between one place and another.

Liberty Lykia Adults Only isn't trying to be an intimate 20-room boutique retreat. This is a substantial Mediterranean resort, and understanding that before arriving matters.

Rooms range across different categories including garden, partial-sea and sea-view Deluxe Rooms alongside suites. The hotel's current accommodation information emphasises views towards either Babadağ or the Mediterranean, with several room and suite configurations available. My room was spacious, calm and comfortable, but the real design feature was beyond the glass. That view changed the rhythm of the day.

Morning light arrived across the mountains; afternoons seemed to dissolve towards the water; and by evening the changing Mediterranean sky became part of the room itself.

This isn't a hotel where I would necessarily book purely for cutting-edge interior design. I would book it for where the room places you. Choose the best sea view your budget allows.

Our first morning began with yoga beneath the trees, guided by Ada, the resort's fitness professional. There was something immediately grounding about practising outside rather than entering a purpose-built studio: birds overhead, the warmth slowly increasing and glimpses of sea beyond the branches. From there, the retreat began opening out.

During our first Holistic Face Fitness session, Leila encouraged us to pay attention to muscles most of us barely realise we use. We explored how facial expressions become habitual and how emotion can subtly shape the way we hold our face.

There was laughter, concentration and more than one discovery involving muscles I had apparently spent decades ignoring. Even my tongue received an education.

Yet what surprised me was how quickly it stopped feeling like a beauty treatment.

It became another form of body awareness.

Bovisaj describes face yoga as exercises focusing on the muscles of the face, while positioning its wider approach within holistic wellness rather than skincare alone.

Our retreat extended far beyond this, moving through restorative yoga, guided meditation, somatic breathwork, creative exercises, sound and ritual.

During art therapy at Gaia Restaurant, we created vision boards and wrote letters to our future selves. One couple inadvertently created boards that seemed to reflect one another, a small detail that produced both laughter and a surprisingly tender moment.

Other sessions went deeper.

Under the guidance of Leila and Loubaba, breathwork and meditation created space for emotions people hadn't necessarily arrived intending to explore. There were tears as well as laughter, but never a sense of being forced towards revelation.

That mattered.

Good retreats don't manufacture transformation. They provide the space in which you might encounter something you hadn't had time to hear.

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THE HAMMAM EFFECT

It would be almost impossible to come to Turkey for a wellness experience without acknowledging the country's bathing traditions.

Liberty Lykia's spa offers Turkish bath rituals alongside sauna and a range of body and skincare treatments. The current adults-only spa also highlights sea-view sauna experiences as part of its wellbeing offering. There is something particularly fitting about combining a contemporary retreat with the much older ritual of hammam.

So much of modern wellness is concerned with optimisation. A hammam asks almost the opposite of us: stop, surrender, allow somebody else to take care of you.

It may be one of the oldest lessons in wellbeing and one of the easiest to forget.

Liberty Lykia approaches food with Mediterranean generosity. The adults-only hotel currently offers both buffet and à la carte dining, including Sarpedon Fish Restaurant overlooking the sea and Sunset à la carte, alongside casual daytime dining.

Meals during the retreat were colourful, fresh and abundant, balancing vegetables, salads and lighter dishes with the pleasure of being on holiday. That distinction is important.

There is a growing tendency to make wellbeing another set of rules to follow. Here, nourishment didn't require removing pleasure from the table.

One of my favourite spaces was Gaia Restaurant, with its relaxed, bohemian atmosphere and views towards the water. It became part dining room, part workshop and eventually part emotional landscape of the retreat itself. Our final dinner there would become one of the defining memories of the trip.

Wake early and open the balcony doors before the heat gathers, then walk beneath the pines towards a morning yoga session overlooking the Mediterranean.

Breakfast can be leisurely rather than functional: fruit, yoghurt, eggs, local produce and coffee taken without looking at the clock.

A retreat morning might move into face fitness, meditation or breathwork before giving way to something less structured — swimming, a hammam ritual, time beside the pool or simply returning to your room with a book. Lunch stretches longer than expected.

The afternoon might bring a massage or walk beneath the trees. Those wanting movement could use the fitness facilities, try water sports or head towards the Lycian Way, while doing absolutely nothing remains an equally respectable option.

Then comes one of the day's small rituals: watching the Mediterranean begin to change colour.

Dinner follows somewhere overlooking the water, conversations become slower, and the day ends without the feeling that you have had to achieve anything at all.

Which, perhaps, is precisely the point.

The most memorable part of my stay wasn't one treatment or one dramatic breakthrough. It was the accumulation of small things: yoga beneath pine trees, discovering unfamiliar muscles in my face, the strangeness and release of breathwork, warm Mediterranean air against my skin, conversations with people who had been strangers days earlier, and moments when nobody needed to be anywhere else.

On our final evening, we returned to Gaia dressed in white. Tables had been laid beneath the night sky, seafood filled the table and a crescent moon hung above us. It would have been easy to dismiss the symbolism as too perfect, but after several days spent exploring ideas of release, renewal and new beginnings, nobody seemed inclined to.

I had arrived thinking I was attending a retreat about radiance. I left wondering whether radiance has considerably less to do with how we look than with what happens when we finally give ourselves enough space to feel fully alive again.

ROAM RATING: 9/10 for a wellbeing escape that still feels gloriously like a holiday.