The İzmir–Çeşme highway opened in 1975, collapsing a two-day mule journey into a seventy-kilometer ribbon of asphalt that runs along the Aegean littoral. Before the road, Çeşme was a fortified harbor known to Genoese merchants and Ottoman customs agents, its castle built in 1508 under Bayezid II to guard the narrowest strait between Anatolia and Chios. Today the peninsula draws half a million visitors annually, most arriving on the same motorway that transformed the port into Turkey's westernmost resort corridor. The Çeşme Castle still anchors the harbor, its tawny limestone walls enclosing a small museum of amphorae and Ottoman naval maps. Beyond the fortress, the town fans out into a grid of cafés and boutique hotels, their shutters painted the pale blue of fishing skiffs. Three kilometers south, Ilıca Beach stretches along a shallow bay where thermal springs bubble up through the sand, warming the water even in winter. The springs have been documented since antiquity; Roman bathers carved niches into the rocks at nearby Germiyan, and traces of their aqueducts still thread the hillsides above the modern spa hotels. Fifteen kilometers inland, Alaçatı has become the peninsula's architectural counterpoint. The village preserves two hundred stone houses built by Greek masons in the nineteenth century, their courtyards shaded by fig trees and their lintels carved with the year of construction. After 1923, Turkish families from Crete and Thessaloniki moved into the abandoned homes, and for decades Alaçatı remained a farming town known for artichokes and sesame. In the early 2000s, designers began converting the stone shells into guesthouses, and the village became synonymous with whitewashed minimalism and Aegean wind. Consistent northerlies have since made Alaçatı Bay one of Europe's premier windsurfing sites, hosting Professional Windsurfers Association events every summer. Most organized excursions from İzmir combine several stops: the castle, a waterfront lunch, and a loop through Alaçatı's cobbled lanes. Island-hopping boat tours depart from Çeşme Marina, calling at Donkey Island and Karaada, where passengers swim in coves accessible only by sea. The peninsula's entrance fee applies to the castle museum and covers access to the ramparts, which offer unobstructed views across the strait to Chios, just eight nautical miles west.