I've come to witness the coming-of-age of this vast coastline, free so far of diesel slicks and Costa del Sol–type concrete high-rises, in July in its peak season. It's a fascinating moment—the area feels as if it's in a sort of leisure puberty, testing its beauty and power, trying on new clothes and fancy imports, all with the music cranked up. There are a few garish spots with too many condos and disco infernos, but mostly I discover places that are stunning in their natural beauty, with the only late-night sound the lapping of a sailboat bow against the current. From Turkey, the country where I find the most varieties of this nouveau leisure, I fly to coast-blessed Croatia—a country that is attempting to upgrade the bargain-seeking backpackers who descended after the end of the Yugoslav wars—and then drive down to two-year-old Montenegro, a little nation of tax havens and lush mountains worthy of Switzerland, construction cranes filling the sky, all overlooking a translucent blue sea. Pressed for time, I skip over Greece, a democracy since the 1970s and a member of the EU, with a leisure life already as developed as Europe's; and Albania, still too poor and lacking in infrastructure to attract much luxury investment.

The Bodrum peninsula is chunky, about 250 square miles, and cinched to the mainland by the town of Bodrum, founded by the Dorian Greeks in the seventh century b.c. The south is clogged with concrete hotels, cheap Chinese restaurants, and Irish pubs, mainly leftovers from the first tourist boom in the 1970s and '80s, but the rest of the landmass that nudges west into the Adriatic toward the Greek isles is largely as it always was, covered with fir trees, citrus groves, and rocks, with little fishing villages nestled into protected coves. When my taxi from the airport finally pulls off a narrow lane into the Maçakizi hotel's overgrown driveway, the sight of disorganized bougainvillea bushes and an uneven stone footpath reassure me I'm on the right track. Or at least my track. Glamour exists in Bodrum. It's just not visible from the road.

But it is visible by sea. I am traveling with my friend Ipek Irgit, a Turkish woman who, like me, lives in New York City, and we discovered that the Maçakizi's pier possesses miraculous social powers. Strangers easily become friends: One afternoon, we meet a Turkish man who takes us for a tour in his little outboard. From the water, the bungalows of the Maçakizi stand matte against the shrub-covered hillside on the outer edge of the crescent-shaped bay. The hotel tells the story of the peninsula itself. First opened in downtown Bodrum in the 1970s by Ayla Emiroğlu as a pensione for her bohemian friends, it hopscotched three more times to different bays to avoid the growing crowds until, nine years ago, it settled in its current perch in Türkbükü. Already, you can see trendy new neighbors muscling in. We speed past a weird Flintstone-esque hotel, Kuum, which had just opened a few days before, its rounded and slightly lopsided concrete buildings punctuated by primitive logs that stick out over the balconies for some sort of conceptual shade. A white daybed-covered dock leads to Bianca, a beach and nightclub, which has thumping body-packed sunset parties, with many of its tipsy revelers zooming back and forth from the hotel via water shuttle. Up in the distant hills we can see the EV Hotel, designed by hyper-contemporary Turkish architect Eren Talu: eight giant white cubes that look like a minimalist art installation by Donald Judd if he'd had a handful of Adderall and a bigger budget. It seems the perfect moment to be in Türkbükü—just enough texture to be interesting but not enough to overwhelm.