Red tour, green tour, blue tour: what each one covers

Ask about tours in any hotel lobby or agency window in Göreme and three colours come up within the first minute: Red, Green and Blue. They’re not an official classification and no single company owns the names, but nearly every agency in town sells some version of all three, and the itineraries are similar enough between operators that the colours function as a shared shorthand. This page explains what each one covers, who runs them, how they differ, and where they fall short — not a full itinerary for your trip, which is better handled by the one-day, two-day or three-day guides.

How the colour system works

None of the three tours is a single fixed product. They’re a local convention: a rough route and a set of stops that most agencies in Göreme, Ürgüp and Avanos replicate under the same colour, usually with small variations in order, lunch venue or an added extra stop. A minibus does a pickup loop of hotels early in the morning, groups merge at a central point, and the group moves between stops for the rest of the day with a guide or driver-guide.

Very little of this is sold as an advance online booking in the way a museum ticket or a balloon flight is. The normal pattern is still to walk into an agency or ask at your hotel desk the evening before, compare what’s included, and book for the next morning or the one after. That works fine outside peak weeks. In April, May, September and October, when hotels fill up, seats on the popular routes can sell out a day or two ahead, so asking on arrival rather than waiting until the morning you want to go is worth doing.

Pre-booking a specific product removes that guesswork if your schedule is tight:

a Red Tour departure from Göreme that includes an underground lunch stop, a small-group Green Tour running the southern route in a full day, or a full-day Blue Tour that also folds in the Göreme Open-Air Museum and Paşabağ for travellers who want the quieter route without losing the northern highlights entirely.

Red tour: the northern loop

The Red Tour, sometimes advertised as the North Tour, is the most-booked of the three and usually the first one visitors do, because it covers the sites closest to Göreme and the names most people have already seen in photos before arriving.

A typical Red Tour stops at the Göreme Open-Air Museum, the cluster of rock-cut churches inside the UNESCO-listed site just outside town; Paşabağ, the valley of double- and triple-capped fairy chimneys also known as Monks Valley; Zelve, the troglodyte village that was inhabited until 1952; Devrent Valley, a short, flat walk through eroded rock shapes with no churches or buildings to see; a ceramics stop in Avanos, the town built on the Kızılırmak’s red clay, usually with a potter’s-wheel demonstration; and a viewpoint over Uçhisar and its rock castle, usually a photo stop rather than a full visit to the castle itself.

Order and exact stop count vary between operators, and the Göreme Open-Air Museum’s Karanlık Kilise (Dark Church) entrance is a separate ticket that group tours don’t cover automatically.

Stop	What it is	Typical time allowed
Göreme Open-Air Museum	Rock-cut churches, UNESCO site	60–90 minutes
Paşabağ	Fairy chimneys, hermit cell	20–30 minutes
Zelve	Abandoned troglodyte village	30–45 minutes
Devrent Valley	Eroded rock formations, no buildings	20–30 minutes
Avanos	Pottery workshop and river town	30–45 minutes
Uçhisar viewpoint	Photo stop over the rock castle	10–15 minutes

Full-day Red Tours are commonly quoted in the region of 25 to 45 EUR per person, lunch and museum entrance fees frequently excluded — confirm this line by line before paying, since the difference between a tour-only price and an all-inclusive one can be 15 to 20 EUR by the end of the day.

Green tour: the southern loop

The Green Tour, sometimes called the South Tour, runs in the opposite direction and covers ground the Red Tour doesn’t touch: the underground cities and the Ihlara Valley canyon, both of which sit roughly 45 minutes to well over an hour from Göreme.

Most Green Tours visit one underground city, either Derinkuyu or Kaymaklı — rarely both, since they’re broadly similar experiences and doing one is enough. From there the group typically moves to the Ihlara Valley, descending the main staircase (close to 380 steps) into the canyon carved by the Melendiz river, and walking a stretch of the roughly 4 km of maintained path past rock-cut churches with surviving frescoes before reaching the hamlet of Belisırma for lunch.

Some itineraries continue on to Selime, the cliff-cut monastery at the canyon’s far end often nicknamed “the cathedral,” and most finish with a stop in Pigeon Valley on the way back into Göreme, named for the carved dovecotes cut into the cliff face to collect pigeon droppings once used as fertiliser.

Stop	What it is	Typical time allowed
Derinkuyu or Kaymaklı	Underground city, 4–8 open levels	45–60 minutes
Ihlara Valley	Canyon walk, rock-cut churches	2–3 hours
Selime (if included)	Cliff-cut monastery	30–45 minutes
Pigeon Valley	Viewpoint over carved dovecotes	15–20 minutes

This is the more physically demanding of the two main tours — the Ihlara descent and walk alone runs to several kilometres on uneven ground, some of it with little shade — and it usually runs 35 to 55 EUR per person, again frequently excluding the underground city entrance fee and lunch. Anyone weighing which underground city to combine it with should read Derinkuyu or Kaymaklı first, since Green Tour operators rarely let you choose on the day.

Blue tour: the quieter east

The Blue Tour is the least sold of the three, and noticeably less crowded as a result — not because the sites are lesser, but because they sit further out and don’t carry the same name recognition as the museum or the underground cities.

A typical Blue Tour heads southeast to Soğanlı Valley, a pair of narrow twin valleys about an hour from Göreme with domed rock-cut churches and very few other visitors, then to Mustafapaşa, the former Greek Orthodox village of Sinasos with its carved stone houses left behind after the 1923 population exchange, and often on to the Keşlik monastery complex nearby. Some operators fold in a stop at the Church of St Barbara or a wine cellar in the Ürgüp area, since the route already passes close by.

Because it draws smaller groups and covers less well-known ground, the Blue Tour is the one to add on a third or fourth day rather than a first, once the main northern and southern sites are already covered. Prices sit in a similar range to the Red Tour, typically 25 to 40 EUR per person, and it’s worth confirming group size specifically, since it’s more often run in smaller minibuses than the other two.

Comparing the three at a glance

	Red Tour	Green Tour	Blue Tour
Direction from Göreme	North	South	Southeast
Signature stops	Open-Air Museum, Paşabağ, Zelve, Devrent, Avanos	Underground city, Ihlara Valley, Selime, Pigeon Valley	Soğanlı, Mustafapaşa, Keşlik
Physical demand	Low to moderate	Moderate to high (Ihlara walk)	Low
How busy	Busiest of the three	Busy, especially at the underground city	Quietest
Typical price per person	25–45 EUR	35–55 EUR	25–40 EUR
Best day to do it	First full day	Second full day	Third day or later

None of these three is a substitute for the others, and none is objectively the best — they cover different areas, and skipping one means skipping whatever ground it alone covers. A traveller with one full day who only does the Red Tour will never see the underground cities or Ihlara Valley on this trip; one who only does the Green Tour misses the Göreme Open-Air Museum entirely.

Why not combine red and green in one day

Agencies in Göreme won’t sell a combined Red-and-Green itinerary in a single day, and it’s worth understanding why before asking for one. Each tour is already a full day on its own — pickup before 9am, return well into the late afternoon — built around a full itinerary of stops, walking and a lunch break in one direction. Stapling both together would mean the Göreme Open-Air Museum, Paşabağ, Zelve, Avanos, an underground city and the full Ihlara Valley walk in a single day, travelling north then doubling back south, with no slack for a site that’s more crowded than expected, a group that runs late, or simply getting tired partway through.

The Ihlara Valley section of the Green Tour in particular is a genuine walk on uneven, often shadeless ground, not a bus-window stop; doing it after a morning already spent on the Red Tour’s stops leaves little energy in reserve, and no organised tour builds in the buffer that would make it work. Splitting the two across two separate days, with a rest morning or a slower activity in between, holds up far better than trying to compress both into one.

Choosing between them

There’s no single right order, but a few practical points make the decision easier. The Red Tour makes sense as a first full day, since it covers ground close to Göreme and includes the Open-Air Museum, which most visitors want to see early rather than late. The Green Tour suits a second full day, ideally not immediately after the Red Tour, given the Ihlara walk. The Blue Tour is worth adding on a third or fourth day, once the higher-profile sites are done and a quieter pace is welcome — see seeing Cappadocia without a tour for how to combine tour days with independent exploring on the days in between.

Travellers who prefer to see the Göreme Open-Air Museum on a smaller, focused visit rather than as one stop among several can also book it separately: a guided tour of the Göreme Open-Air Museum on its own runs a fraction of a Red Tour’s length and allows more time in front of the frescoes, including the option to add the separately ticketed Karanlık Kilise.

Booking a colour tour in Göreme

In practice, most visitors still book these on the ground: a hotel reception desk or an agency on Göreme’s main street, comparing two or three quoted prices, confirming exactly what’s included, and paying either in cash or by card. Ask specifically whether entrance fees and lunch are included, how many people will be in the group, and what time pickup starts — hotel-to-hotel pickup loops can add 20 to 30 minutes before the tour proper begins. If your travel dates fall in peak season or you’d rather not spend an evening comparing agency quotes, booking a fixed departure in advance removes that step entirely, and the same product usually costs about the same either way.