Ural Ataman Classic Car Museum

Situated on the gentle hill overlooking the neighbourhood of Emirgan and the Bosphorus, Emirgan Park was for long the only place in the city where Istanbulites can admire the beauty of tulips. Having lost that distinction since the first decade of the 2000s as tulips are now everywhere, this is still a beautiful park with artificial ponds, small waterfalls, and impressive views of the Bosphorus. There are also cafes with open-air sections housed in pleasant former imperial hunting manors. Squirrels are there, too, in the middle of this metropolis of more than 15 million people, though you may have to look a bit deeper (or a bit upper on the branches!) to spot them.

Museum with a rich collection of calligraphy and paintings. It also hosts temporary exhibitions of works by some world-class artists such as Pablo Picasso from time to time.

Built with support of Shimonoseki, one of Istanbul's sister cities, the garden features a tea room, ponds, waterfalls, as well as a cherry lane.

A private museum housed in a yalı, the traditional wooden waterfront mansions that line the banks of the Bosphorus. The exhibition includes a number of archaeological and ethnographical artifacts from the collection of the long-time entrepreneur and industrialist Koç Family, though just seeing the interior of a yalı is worth entering.

It houses the headquarters of Borusan Holding and the Borusan Contemporary art museum. The popular nickname of the mansion, Perili Köşk (meaning the "Haunted Mansion") refers to its construction remaining partially unfinished for a long period (its second and third floors remained empty for decades.)

Built in first half of the 15th century, this is the large medieval castle under the Second Bosphorus Bridge. Its former name Boğazkesen (Turkish)/Laimokopia (Greek) means both "strait-blocker" and "throat-cutter" in both languages and denotes the reason of its building—to shut the supply routes from the Black Sea in the north into the slowly falling apart Byzantine Empire through the Bosphorus. Rumeli, literally "the Roman land", was the name of the European half of the Ottoman Empire, and as is usual with some other structures and villages along the Bosphorus, used as a prefix to differentiate Rumeli Hisarı from its counterpart in the Asian Side, the much smaller Anadolu Hisarı just across the Bosphorus.