Turkey’s Position in Mediterranean Yachting

Some data, published in the Turkish Daily Milliyet a few days ago[2] have made me to evaluate Turkey’s position in the Mediterranean leasure marine scen.

The data is as follows:

It should be noted that these data are not complete and that yachting centres like Tunisia, Malta, Gibraltar have unfortunately been omitted due to lack of data at this time. However, we believe, that the stunning overall result for Turkey will not be affected in major due to these omisions.

Firstly, the length of the coastlines is compared in Fig. 1.

Here can be seen that the Turkish coastline of the Med, Aegean and the Marmara sea, account for  about 16%of the countries in scope. It should be noted that this number will decrease to 13% only, if the total of the Med coastlines are considered. Thus, the subselection can be regarded as reasonably representative. Turkey’s coastline is overpassed by the Greek and Italian coastlines and make up a major part of the Med shores.

Next, in Fig. 2 and 3 we regard the number of marinas and moorings in the selection. Both distributions are rougly similar in themselves, but drastically different to Fig 1: A giant France (accounting for about 2% of the Med coastllines) boosts with nearly about half of the Mediterranean leasure facilities. France is followed by Spain and Italy with about 40% in between themselves. Remains 10% facilities for the rest, perhaps 15% if all the missing countries of this study are included.

Finally an even more dramatic picture comes up when we start to compare densities in Fig. 4 and 5. While the marina and mooring densities are again roughly similar, we can see that the marina/ mooring density of Turkey is not much more than 1% of a towering France[3].

Putting into account the exceptional beauty and diversity of the Turkish coastline and the hinterland, the improving infrastructure and connectivity in particular to Central Europe, the friendly resourcefulness of the Turkish people, I can only deduct, that there is still a long and, hopefully, pleasent way ahead - even considering the still unyielding attitude of the bureaucracy.

Furthermore, whoever knows the seas and shores, can see from these few numbers that  the real competition in the Med of next the future  will be between Turkey and Croatia.

A technical note:

The measurement of an irregular and curving feature such as a nation's coastal length is subject to fractal geometry, scale-dependent and very difficult to measure, also due to effects of erosion, tides etc. The estimates here may differ from other published sources. Most of the coastline length was derived from the World Vector Shoreline database at 1:250,000. Please refer to the original source for further information on the variables and collection methodologies.