Gölmarmara is a town and district of
Manisa Province in
Turkey
Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a list of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolia, Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with ...
's
Aegean at a distance of from the province center of
Manisa. The town owes its name to the nearby
Lake Marmara, called under various names throughout history. The town of Gölmarmara itself was a mere village in
Ottoman times cited under such names as ''"Marmaracık"'' or ''"Mermere"''. It was made into a township with its own municipality depending the district center of
Akhisar at the time of the foundation of the
Turkish Republic (1923) and in 1987 a district center by its own right and under the same name, Gölmarmara.
According to the 2000 census, the population of the district is 17,831, of which 11,205 live in the town of Gölmarmara.
The annual rate of increase in population for Gölmarmara town is 0.206% while an annual decrease of 0.381% was registered for its depending villages. The district covers an area of , and consists of 18 settlements, the district center being the only one with its own municipality and the remainder consisting of 15 villages and two village dependencies (
hamlets). Gölmarmara lies at an elevation of .
Agricultural lands and forest lands each occupy roughly around 11,500 hectares in the district area, with a total of and with a few thousand in the fertile plain of the
Gediz River valley remaining unused. Lake Marmara, aside from being a recreational center for the province as a whole, is also an important source for fishing and agricultural irrigation. Slightly lower than the town center at , the lake is also an
Important Bird Area.
There are six primary schools and two high schools in Gölmarmara, with a total teacher's corpus of 117 and a student's corpus of 3,094. A small professional higher school depending
Celal Bayar University is also located in Gölmarmara, its academic corpus composed of six teachers providing education higher education with a professional focus to 144 students.
The town's most important historical building is Halime Hatun Religious Complex built by the Ottoman sultan
Mehmed III during his tenure in Manisa (1583-1595) in the name of his
wet nurse and his future grand vizier
Tekeli Lala Mehmed Pasha's mother-in-law Halime Hatun.
In 2015 an important archaeological discovery was made in the ar