The Most Beautiful Beaches in the World

49 places in 21 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Navagio

   Ναυάγιο

   Greece37.860° N 20.625° E

   

   The wreck that gives this cove its name ran aground on October 5, 1980. The coaster MV Panagiotis, caught in a storm along Zakynthos's sheer western coastline, was steered — or drove — into the hidden bay, and its crew abandoned the ship there, reportedly while being pursued by the Greek Navy. The vessel has sat rusting on the sand ever since, and "Navagio," the beach's name today, simply means shipwreck in Greek.

   Did you know? The rusting hull began life in Scotland: launched in January 1937 at Bowling on the River Clyde as the coaster Saint Bedan for a Glasgow firm.

   More about Navagio →

2. 02 Voidokilia Beach

   Βοϊδοκοιλιά

   Greece36.964° N 21.663° E

   

   Voidokilia is one of those beaches whose shape you remember before anything else. Seen from the hills above, it is an almost perfect semicircle of pale sand closing a small bay of the Ionian Sea, so regular that it is usually compared to the Greek letter omega. The arc is not just a beach but a narrow bar of dunes: on the seaward side lies sheltered, shallow water; on the landward side spreads the Gialova Lagoon, one of the most important wetlands in Greece for migrating birds. Close to the village of Petrochori and the town of Pylos in Messinia, the whole area belongs to the Natura 2000 network.

   Did you know? The dunes and lagoon around the bay shelter the only population of the African chameleon in Europe, a species thought to have arrived here in Roman times.

   More about Voidokilia Beach →

3. 03 Bay of Fires

   Australia41.137° S 148.308° E

   

   The Bay of Fires runs for about 50 kilometres along the north-east coast of Tasmania, from Binalong Bay in the south to Eddystone Point in the north. It is a coast of three colours. The sand is white and fine, the water a clear, cold turquoise, and between the beaches lie piles of rounded granite boulders splashed with bright orange. The orange is not the rock itself but a lichen that grows over the granite, and in the low light of morning or evening it glows almost like flame against the blue.

   Did you know? The fiery orange on the boulders comes mainly from firedot lichens of the genus Caloplaca, which thrive on the coastal granite.

   More about Bay of Fires →

4. 04 Zlatni Rat

   Zlatni rat

   Croatia · 32.3 km from Split43.256° N 16.634° E

   

   Zlatni Rat, the "Golden Cape", is a tongue of fine pebbles that runs out from the southern coast of the island of Brač into the Hvar Channel, about two kilometres west of the harbour town of Bol. It is the most photographed beach in Croatia, and the reason is plain from above: a long, narrow point, white along its edges and green with pines at its root, pushed out into the deep blue Adriatic like the blade of a spearhead. On the eastern and western sides the shoreline runs for several hundred metres each, and the water shallows gently over the pebbles, turning a vivid turquoise.

   Did you know? The cape has been protected by law since 1965 and is now listed as a significant landscape covering about 12.8 hectares.

   More about Zlatni Rat →

5. 05 Anse Source d'Argent

   Anse Source d'argent

   Seychelles4.372° S 55.827° E

   

   Anse Source d'Argent is a two-kilometre ribbon of white sand on the south-west coast of La Digue, the fourth-largest of the granitic islands of the Seychelles. It is often called the most photographed beach in the world, and the reason is geological rather than tropical. Along its whole length the shore is broken up by enormous boulders of granite, rounded and fluted by rain and sea into shapes that look sculpted: heads, slabs, overhangs, stacked eggs. The beach is never more than about twenty metres wide, so the rocks divide it into a string of small coves, each with its own frame of stone and palms.

   Did you know? The granite boulders have been dated to between about 748 and 755 million years ago, deep in the Precambrian.

   More about Anse Source d'Argent →

6. 06 Praia das Catedrais

   Playa de Las Catedrales

   Spain43.554° N 7.157° W

   

   The beach that everyone calls the Cathedrals goes by a humbler name on the map: Praia de Augas Santas, "Holy Waters", on the Cantabrian coast of Ribadeo in the far north-east of Galicia. At high tide it looks like an ordinary strip of sand under a cliff. When the sea draws back, the cliff turns out to be hollow. Waves have worked the slate and schist along planes of weakness into a row of arches and flying buttresses, some of them more than thirty metres tall, and you walk beneath them on wet sand as if down the aisle of a flooded church.

   Did you know? The slate and quartzite of the arches is roughly 500 million years old, laid down as sediment along an ancient shoreline in the Southern Hemisphere.

   More about Praia das Catedrais →

7. 07 Caló d'es Moro

   Spain39.314° N 3.121° E

   

   Caló d'es Moro is a tiny cove on the southeastern coast of Mallorca, in the municipality of Santanyí, and its smallness is the point. The beach itself is only about thirty metres long and twenty wide, a pocket of white sand and pebbles at the end of a narrow inlet. Around it rise tall limestone walls covered with pines, broom and mastic, so that the cove seems cut into the island rather than lying along its edge. Over the sandy bottom the water is extraordinarily clear, shading from glassy green near the shore to deep turquoise where the inlet opens towards the sea.

   Did you know? The name means roughly the little cove of the Moor, and local tradition links it to a landing, or attempted landing, by Moorish pirates centuries ago.

   More about Caló d'es Moro →

8. 08 Myrtos Beach

   Greece38.344° N 20.536° E

   • Blue Flag

   

   Myrtos is the beach that makes people stop the car. On the north-west coast of Kefalonia, in the Pylaros area, a long curve of dazzling white pebbles sits at the foot of steep cliffs between two mountains, Agia Dynati and Kalon Oros, and the sea in front of it glows an improbable turquoise. The best view is from above, from the winding road that drops down to it, where the whole crescent comes into view at once.

   Did you know? Myrtos has won Greece's online vote for the country's best beach more than ten times, more often than any other Greek beach.

   More about Myrtos Beach →

9. 09 Cala Goloritzé

   Italy40.108° N 9.690° E

   

   Cala Goloritzé is a small cove at the southern end of the Gulf of Orosei, on the wild eastern coast of Sardinia in the municipality of Baunei. It is younger than it looks: the pale fan of pebbles on which people now lie was brought down by a landslide in 1962. What frames it is far older limestone, cut into three shapes that make the place unmistakable — a white shingle beach, a natural arch opening on its right-hand side, and above everything a needle of rock, the Aguglia, rising 143 metres over the cove.

   Did you know? The 1962 landslide that created the beach happened when karst water, flowing on the surface and underground, undermined part of the western cliff.

   More about Cala Goloritzé →

10. 10 Porto Katsiki

    Greece38.602° N 20.549° E

    • Blue Flag

    

    Porto Katsiki lies on the wild south-west coast of Lefkada, where pale cliffs fall straight into the Ionian Sea. The beach itself is a strip of stones at the foot of a curved, concave cliff, and its fame comes from the contrast between the bright rock and the clear blue water. The sea is deep here and the bay drops away quickly; beyond the headlands the seabed falls to hundreds of metres.

    Did you know? According to Strabo, at Apollo's festival on nearby Cape Lefkada a condemned criminal was thrown from the cliff with feathers and live birds tied on to slow his fall.

    More about Porto Katsiki →

11. 11 Wharariki Beach

    New Zealand40.504° S 172.674° E

    

    Wharariki Beach lies at the very top of New Zealand's South Island, just west of Cape Farewell, where the land runs out and the Tasman Sea meets the open ocean with nothing to break its swell. It is a beach you have to walk to: the road ends in farmland, and a track crosses farm paddocks and a strip of coastal bush before the land falls away over wind-carved dunes to a long, wide sweep of sand. The wind here is the sculptor. It keeps the grassy dunes on the move, draws ripples across the sand and whips spray off the breakers.

    Did you know? When Windows 10 launched in 2015, staff at the local Tasman District Council assumed their own IT team had set the Archway Islands as their lock screen.

    More about Wharariki Beach →

12. 12 Sarakiniko, Milos

    Σαρακήνικο Μήλου

    Greece36.743° N 24.458° E

    

    On the north shore of Milos the land turns white. Sarakiniko is a stretch of coast where pale volcanic rock — tuff made largely of pumice and ash, laid down by submarine eruptions on the South Aegean Volcanic Arc — has been planed by the north wind and the sea into smooth, rounded waves of stone. There is no palm-fringed beach here in the usual sense: the heart of the place is a narrow, deep-blue inlet cutting into the rock, with a small strip of fine white sand at its head and bare shelves of stone sloping into the water on both sides.

    Did you know? Beneath the white tuff lie beds of diatomite, a rock built from the silica shells of microscopic algae, in places more than 100 metres thick.

    More about Sarakiniko, Milos →

13. 13 Praia da Marinha

    Portugal · 11.8 km from Portimão37.090° N 8.412° W

    

    Praia da Marinha is a small cove at the foot of the golden cliffs of Lagoa, in the central Algarve, and it has become a kind of emblem of the Portuguese south coast — it has even appeared on the cover of a well-known guidebook to Portugal. The beach itself is modest: a patch of golden sand reached down a path and steps from the clifftop. What makes it extraordinary is the rock around it. The cliffs are marine limestone and dolomite laid down some 24 million years ago, in the Miocene, soft enough for the sea to sculpt them into arches, caves, pillars and chimneys of every size.

    Did you know? The name translates as 'Navy Beach' or 'Marine Beach'.

    More about Praia da Marinha →

14. 14 Boulders Beach

    South Africa · 31 km from Cape Town34.197° S 18.451° E

    

    Boulders Beach is a small chain of coves on the False Bay shore of the Cape Peninsula, just south of the naval town of Simon's Town, and it owes its name and its look to the stone. Enormous rounded granite boulders, around 540 million years old, are scattered along the shore and in the water, enclosing pockets of white sand and calm, clear pools sheltered from the swell. On their own they would make this one of the prettiest corners of the Cape; but the boulders are also home to a colony of African penguins, and that makes the beach unique.

    Did you know? African penguins are nicknamed jackass penguins because their loud braying call sounds remarkably like a donkey.

    More about Boulders Beach →

15. 15 Whitehaven Beach

    Australia20.283° S 149.035° E

    

    Whitehaven Beach runs for some seven kilometres along the eastern shore of Whitsunday Island, the largest of the Whitsunday group off the Queensland coast, inside Whitsunday Islands National Park. Its colour is the first surprise: the sand is about 98 per cent pure silica, so fine and so white that it holds far less heat than ordinary sand and stays comfortable to walk on barefoot. Against it the Coral Sea shows every shade from glassy green in the shallows to deep ink-blue in the channel.

    Did you know? The surrounding islands contain too little quartz to explain the beach, so geologists think its sand was carried north along the Queensland coast by ocean currents.

    More about Whitehaven Beach →

16. 16 Maya Bay

    Thailand7.677° N 98.766° E

    

    Ko Phi Phi Le, in the Andaman Sea off Thailand's Krabi province, is a small island made almost entirely of steep limestone hills, arranged in a ring around two shallow bays. Maya Bay is the more famous of them: a beach of pale sand about 250 metres long, enclosed on three sides by sheer limestone cliffs hung with vegetation, with a narrow opening to the sea. The effect is of a hidden amphitheatre, the water inside glowing turquoise over sand and coral.

    Did you know? The limestone walls around the bay rise up to about 200 metres, enclosing a crescent-shaped lagoon of roughly five hectares.

    More about Maya Bay →

17. 17 Papakolea Beach

    United States18.936° N 155.646° W

    

    The sand at Papakolea is green because a volcanic cone is quietly falling apart above it. The headland enclosing the beach is a littoral cone built from an old Mauna Loa-era eruption, rich in olivine — a dense, iron-and-magnesium silicate that's among the very first minerals to crystallize as volcanic magma cools. As the cone erodes, waves sort the debris: heavier olivine crystals settle and accumulate on the beach while lighter black basalt sand gets carried back out to sea, leaving a shoreline that's an extraordinary 88 to 92 percent olivine crystal by weight.

    Did you know? The cone sheltering the beach, Puʻu Mahana, formed more than 49,000 years ago on the southwest rift zone of Mauna Loa.

    More about Papakolea Beach →

18. 18 Kynance Cove

    United Kingdom · 29 km from Penzance49.974° N 5.230° W

    

    Kynance Cove lies on the western side of the Lizard peninsula, roughly two miles north of Lizard Point at the very end of the peninsula. What makes it unlike any other Cornish beach is the rock. The cliffs and stacks are serpentine, a rare stone that began as mantle rock beneath an ancient ocean floor and was pushed up onto the land; polished by the sea it turns deep green and red, veined like marbled meat. Against it lies pale sand and, on a clear day, water of an almost tropical turquoise. Geologists value the place as much as painters do: it is part of the West Lizard Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Geological Conservation Review site.

    Did you know? The rock of the cove began about 375 million years ago at an ocean ridge some 30 degrees south of the equator, then drifted north to Cornwall.

    More about Kynance Cove →

19. 19 Reynisfjara

    Iceland63.405° N 19.064° W

    

    Reynisfjara is a black beach on Iceland's south coast, just west of the village of Vík í Mýrdal, and it is one of the most dramatic places on the whole island to watch the North Atlantic. The sand and pebbles are volcanic, dark as charcoal,, and the Atlantic swell breaks on them with full force. The beach lies within the Katla UNESCO Global Geopark, and on a clear day the ice cap of Eyjafjallajökull shows inland.

    Did you know? In 1991 Reynisfjara was listed among the ten most beautiful non-tropical beaches on Earth.

    More about Reynisfjara →

20. 20 Trunk Bay

    United States18.352° N 64.770° W

    

    Trunk Bay curves along the north shore of St. John in the US Virgin Islands, a crescent of white coral sand facing a small rocky islet. That islet, Trunk Cay, rises only about 15 metres above the sea some 60 metres off the beach, with low cliffs, a fringe of sand and a few palms of its own. It is the composition that makes the bay so photographed: the green headlands of St. John, the pale arc of sand, the cay set like a full stop in the turquoise water in the middle of the view.

    Did you know? Snorkellers in Trunk Bay swim over elkhorn coral, the first coral ever proposed for protection as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act, now recovering naturally here.

    More about Trunk Bay →

21. 21 Miho no Matsubara

    Japan · 12.6 km from Shizuoka34.995° N 138.523° E

    

    A sweep of black sand and pine forest some 7 km long curves along Suruga Bay, and across the water, on clear days, the cone of Mount Fuji rises above the sea. Miho no Matsubara, the pine grove of Miho, has been painted, sung and staged for centuries, and since 2013 it has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage site Fujisan, sacred place and source of artistic inspiration, recognised for the part it played in the art and imagination surrounding the mountain.

    Did you know? ICOMOS at first advised leaving Miho out of the Mount Fuji World Heritage listing because it lies some 45 km from the mountain; the committee kept it in.

    More about Miho no Matsubara →

22. 22 The Baths, Virgin Gorda

    The Baths

    British Virgin Islands18.429° N 64.445° W

    

    At the southern tip of Virgin Gorda the shoreline breaks up into a jumble of enormous granite boulders, some of them about 40 feet long, piled on the sand and in the shallows as if dropped by a careless giant. The Baths is the name for this stretch of coast between Spring Bay and Devil's Bay, where the gaps beneath and between the rocks form tidal pools, tunnels, arches and grottoes open to the sea. The water inside is clear and still, and the light falls through the cracks in shafts.

    Did you know? Christopher Columbus is said to have named the island Virgin Gorda, the fat virgin, because its profile resembled a woman lying on her side.

    More about The Baths, Virgin Gorda →

23. 23 Bahia de las Aguilas

    Bahía de las Águilas

    Dominican Republic · 21.9 km from Pedernales17.862° N 71.646° W

    

    Bahía de las Águilas, the Bay of Eagles, is some eight kilometres of pale sand curving along the far south-western corner of the Dominican Republic, close to the southern end of the border with Haiti. There is no town, hotel or road along the shore: only the beach, a backdrop of low, sun-baked scrub, and water of such clarity that the bay is often counted among the most transparent in the Caribbean. Offshore lie coral reefs and broad meadows of sea grass that colour the shallows in bands of turquoise and green.

    Did you know? La Cueva, the fishing village where boats to the bay set out, is named after the caves around it, which local fishermen lived in until 2007.

    More about Bahia de las Aguilas →

24. 24 Butterfly Valley, Fethiye

    Kelebekler Vadisi

    Turkey36.497° N 29.127° E

    

    Butterfly Valley is a narrow canyon that opens onto the Mediterranean on the Turkish coast south of Fethiye. Its walls rise 350 to 400 metres, so steep that the valley floor is effectively cut off from the land around it, and the only easy way in is from the sea. At the mouth lies a small beach; behind it the gorge runs three or four kilometres back into the mountain, fed by a stream that comes down from a spring near the village of Faralya, high on the rim above.

    Did you know? The valley's emblem is not a butterfly at all: the Jersey tiger is a day-flying moth whose red hindwings warn predators that it is chemically protected.

    More about Butterfly Valley, Fethiye →

25. 25 Baía do Sancho

    Brazil3.854° S 32.444° W

    

    Fernando de Noronha is a small volcanic archipelago of 21 islands some 350 km off the north-east coast of Brazil, and Baía do Sancho is the jewel of its main island. The bay is a curve of golden-white sand at the foot of high cliffs, backed by green scrub and facing water that runs from brilliant turquoise near the shore to deep blue beyond. There is no road down and no building on the beach: the cliffs close it off from the land, which is exactly what keeps it so unspoiled.

    Did you know? Tripadvisor's Travelers' Choice awards named Sancho the world's best beach for a seventh time in 2025, after earlier wins including 2023.

    More about Baía do Sancho →

26. 26 Wineglass Bay

    Australia42.156° S 148.332° E

    

    On Tasmania's east coast, the Freycinet Peninsula runs south into the Tasman Sea behind a line of jagged granite peaks called the Hazards. On the far side of them lies Wineglass Bay — a perfect, symmetrical crescent of white sand closing a bowl of clear, deep-blue water, with forested granite slopes rising on both sides. From above, the bay looks as if it had been drawn with a compass, and the shape is the source of its name, along with a darker story.

    Did you know? The Hazards are said to be named after Richard Hazard, an African-American whaling captain of the ship Thalia recorded off this coast in 1824.

    More about Wineglass Bay →

27. 27 Anse Lazio

    Seychelles4.294° S 55.702° E

    

    Anse Lazio curves around a sheltered bay at the far north-western tip of Praslin, the second-largest island of the Seychelles. It is the classic Seychelles composition in its most generous form: a long arc of fine pale sand, a fringe of takamaka trees and palms behind it, and at each end a pile of massive granite boulders, weathered into rounded forms and streaked with the colours of the rock. Lonely Planet calls it the best beach on Praslin, and in 2016 CNN placed it fourth among the best beaches in the world.

    Did you know? The granite boulders at each end of the bay crystallised some 750 million years ago, making them far older than the Indian Ocean around them.

    More about Anse Lazio →

28. 28 Railay Beach

    Thailand · 9.2 km from Krabi8.011° N 98.839° E

    

    Railay is a sliver of the Krabi coast that behaves like an island. It sits on a small peninsula between Krabi town and Ao Nang, but tall limestone walls close it off from the mainland on the landward side, so there is no road in and everyone arrives by water. That isolation shapes everything about the place: long-tail boats nose onto the sand, footpaths do the work of streets, and the cliffs rise straight out of the beach and the shallows, streaked orange and grey.

    Did you know? The salty, humid sea air at Railay corrodes ordinary steel climbing bolts so badly that many routes have had to be re-equipped with titanium anchors.

    More about Railay Beach →

29. 29 Flamenco Beach

    United States18.328° N 65.316° W

    

    A mile of pale sand curves around a horseshoe-shaped bay on the northwestern shore of Culebra, a small island municipality off the east coast of Puerto Rico. A reef lies roughly a quarter of a mile out, so the Atlantic swell breaks offshore and the water inside the bay stays shallow, clear and an intense turquoise. Behind the beach lies Flamenco Lagoon, which lent the place its name: Caribbean flamingos were once a common sight there.

    Did you know? In 1971 protesters led by Rubén Berríos, head of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, occupied the Navy's target zone at Flamenco Beach and stayed for weeks.

    More about Flamenco Beach →

30. 30 Stiniva

    Croatia43.018° N 16.171° E

    

    Stiniva is a hidden cove on the south coast of the Croatian island of Vis, closed off from the open Adriatic by two vertical limestone walls about thirty metres high that stand only some four metres apart. Pass through that slot by boat or by swimming and the cliffs open into an almost round amphitheatre of rock around a small beach of smooth white pebbles and turquoise water. From the sea the entrance is easy to miss altogether.

    Did you know? The cove runs about 600 metres inland from its narrow mouth, and the old fishermen's houses at its head are protected together with the bay.

    More about Stiniva →