Symbolizing elegant beauty, butterflies have made Turkey, especially Fethiye and the Kackar Mountains, their home.

With their delicate bodies and brilliant colors, butterflies go hand in hand with days of sunshine and fields of wild flowers. What is it that gives them their spellbinding beauty? Their wings, of course, which seem to consist of brightly colored dust. In fact it is not dust at all but scales that look like grains of dust. These scales distinguish butterflies from other insects as the ‘scaly-winged order’, one of the largest insect groups with 150,000 species. Among themselves they are divided into two groups, diurnal and nocturnal, which are easily distinguished: while butterflies hold their wings vertically, moths flatten them against the surface on which they are resting their bodies.