The Karaburun region is comparatively much less visited than Çeşme located in its south, its rate of urbanization at 20 per cent is the lowest across İzmir Province, although it provides an anticlimax to its southern neighbor and the associated attractions especially for those who want to escape the trails of mass tourism.

The coasts of the peninsula have beautiful bays and pebble or sand beaches, many as yet largely undiscovered by outsiders, although there is one German vacation village slightly to the north of the district center.

The distance between Karaburun and İzmir center by way of land is 100 km (approximately 60 miles) and there are regular bus services and a three-lane modern highway until the toll near Çeşme.

The country road is traced northwards along the eastern coast of the peninsula to reach Mordoğan first, which is, aside from Karaburun, the district's only other depending township with own municipality.

In Ionian through to Byzantine times, the region also carried the names Stelar or Stylarius, Caleberno by the Genoese and Ahırlı during the Ottoman era.

Another possibility may have to do with the very translation of the Turkish name, which means "black cape", a fitting description especially for sailors who approach Karaburun Peninsula from open sea.

The level of literacy in Karaburun nears hundred per cent, and the district is advantaged by the rather comfortable number of students, 12 in 2007, per teacher.

Nearer to Karaburun is the abandoned village of Sazak whose inhabitants were subject to the 1923 Population exchange between Greece and Turkey in the frame of the Treaty of Lausanne.

There has been talk for many years about starting ferry services from İzmir to these two centers of the peninsula, which would be quite practical by allowing visitors to avoid the difficult end-portion of the land route, but the project meets the opposition of the dolmuş lobby.