Beach & coasts

Where land meets sea — sand, cliff, and tide.

Balabac Islands

Balabac, southern Palawan

A remote cluster of islands off Palawan's southern tip, ringed by blindingly white and faintly pink sandbars, clear shallow lagoons, and some of the last dugong (sea cow) habitat in the country.

Beach & coast Southeast Asia

Bay of Fundy

New Brunswick & Nova Scotia, Canada

Home to the highest tides on Earth — up to 16 metres of water rising and falling twice a day, laying bare a seabed you can walk across beneath towering flowerpot rocks.

Beach & coast North America

Cape of Good Hope

Cape Peninsula, Western Cape, South Africa

The wild, storied headland at the tip of the Cape Peninsula — soaring sea cliffs, wind-blasted fynbos and crashing surf where two ocean currents meet, long mistaken for the southern tip of Africa.

Beach & coast Africa

Great Santa Cruz Island

Zamboanga City, Zamboanga Peninsula, Mindanao

One of the few pink-sand beaches in the world — a protected island off Zamboanga City whose blush-coloured shore comes from crushed red organ-pipe coral, backed by a mangrove lagoon.

Beach & coast Southeast Asia

Jasmund Chalk Cliffs

Jasmund National Park, Rügen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany

Germany's largest chalk cliffs, dropping white into the Baltic on the island of Rügen — topped by the last great beech forest on this coast, and eroding fast enough that the shoreline is measurably different within a lifetime.

Beach & coast Europe

Ölüdeniz

Fethiye, Muğla Province, southwest Turkey

A sheltered turquoise lagoon sealed off from the open Aegean by a slender sand spit, backed by the pine-clad wall of Babadağ — one of the world's premier paragliding launches — and the cliff-ringed cove of Butterfly Valley nearby.

Beach & coast Middle East

Railay

Krabi Province, southern Thailand

A tiny peninsula of white-sand beaches walled off from the mainland by towering limestone cliffs — reachable only by boat, and one of the world's great rock-climbing spots.

Beach & coast Southeast Asia

Reynisfjara

Near Vík í Mýrdal, South Iceland

Iceland's famous black-sand beach — jet-black volcanic sand under a cliff of stacked basalt columns, with offshore sea stacks and a powerful, genuinely dangerous surf rolling straight in off the North Atlantic.

Beach & coast Europe

Skeleton Coast

Northwestern Namibia

Where the world's oldest desert meets the cold Atlantic — a fog-shrouded shore of shipwrecks, immense dunes, and seal colonies, kept alive by mist rolling off the frigid Benguela Current.

Beach & coast Africa

Tayrona National Park

Magdalena, Caribbean coast, Colombia

Where the jungled foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta tumble straight into the Caribbean — a coast of golden coves, giant granite boulders and rainforest, still lived in and cultivated by the Indigenous peoples who hold it.

Beach & coast Latin America

The Calanques

Between Marseille and Cassis, Provence, France

A string of steep white-limestone inlets on the Mediterranean coast near Marseille — hidden turquoise coves walled by sun-bleached cliffs, reached on foot or by boat.

Beach & coast Europe

The Curonian Spit

Klaipėda County, western Lithuania, extending into Kaliningrad Oblast

A 98-kilometre ribbon of sand dune separating a lagoon from the Baltic — never more than a few kilometres wide, and standing only because two centuries of deliberate replanting stopped it burying itself.

Beach & coast Europe

The High Coast

Gulf of Bothnia, northeastern Sweden

A rugged Baltic coast of forested hills, cliffs, and islands that is still visibly rising out of the sea — the site of the greatest land uplift measured anywhere on Earth.

Beach & coast Europe

The Jurassic Coast

Dorset and East Devon, South West England, United Kingdom

England's only natural World Heritage Site — a 95-mile coast where 185 million years of Earth history stand exposed in the cliffs, from red Triassic desert rocks to the sea-carved arch of Durdle Door.

Beach & coast Europe

Whitehaven Beach

Whitsunday Island, Queensland, Australia

A seven-kilometre stretch of near-pure silica sand so white and fine it squeaks underfoot, curving along uninhabited Whitsunday Island, where at Hill Inlet the tide swirls the sand and shallows into shifting ribbons of white and turquoise.

Beach & coast Oceania