The Most Beautiful Lidos in the World
6 places in 4 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful lidos in the world are Jubilee Pool (United Kingdom), Tinside Lido (United Kingdom) and Natural pools of Porto Moniz (Portugal). The list covers 6 lidos in 4 countries. Portugal has the most, with 2. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A lido is an open-air pool built for swimming in the sun, and the most memorable ones sit right at the edge of the sea. Their appeal is the meeting of geometry and water: a crisp concrete curve or triangle laid against waves, rocks and sky, with diving boards and terraces that turn a swim into a small piece of theatre. Many were built between the wars, when sea bathing became a public pleasure and towns competed with Art Deco pools.
This collection moves from Cornwall to Sydney. The Jubilee Pool in Penzance, opened in 1935, is a triangular seawater lido in pale Art Deco curves, and Plymouth's Tinside Lido from the same year is a semicircle beneath the Hoe. On Madeira, the natural pools of Porto Moniz fill basins of black volcanic rock with Atlantic water. The Venetian Pool in Coral Gables, Florida, was carved from a coral-rock quarry in the 1920s and dressed with Venetian-style towers and loggias. Near Porto, Álvaro Siza set the tidal pools of Leça da Palmeira among the shoreline rocks, and at Bondi the Icebergs pool takes the waves directly over its wall.
Each lido here was chosen for how it looks and is ranked by beauty. Every one has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a place on the map, and the section also opens by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jubilee Pool | Lido | United Kingdom | |
| 2 | Tinside Lido | Lido | United Kingdom | |
| 3 | Natural pools of Porto Moniz | Lido | Portugal | |
| 4 | Venetian Pool | Lido | United States | |
| 5 | Tidal Pools of Leça da Palmeira | Lido | Portugal | |
| 6 | Bondi Icebergs Pool | Lido | Australia |
01 Jubilee Pool
United Kingdom · 2.5 km from Penzance50.115° N 5.531° W
Tom Parnell · CC BY-SA 4.0 Jubilee Pool sits on Battery Rocks at the edge of Penzance, a seawater lido built out into the sea itself. It holds about five million litres of seawater, is roughly 90 m long and 50 m wide, and takes up to 600 swimmers. It is the largest seawater pool in the United Kingdom and, apart from Saltdean Lido, counted as the finest surviving lido of its era, listed at Grade II. The rocks were a bathing spot long before the pool. The borough engineer, Captain Frank Latham, designed the pool between 1931 and 1934 to fit their shape. Writers have called it Art Deco, cubist-inspired, even a seagull in flight, and each catches something of its sharp, sweeping outline against the water.
Did you know? The pool's triangular plan, jutting out from the rocks into the sea, was chosen to stand up to Cornish storms while its curving walls shelter swimmers from the wind.
02 Tinside Lido
United Kingdom · 2.8 km from Plymouth50.363° N 4.142° W
Nilfanion · CC BY-SA 3.0 Tinside Lido is an open-air seawater pool on the rocky foreshore below Plymouth Hoe, looking out over Plymouth Sound. Designed by the city engineer John Wibberley and opened on 2 October 1935, it is one of the most elegant Art Deco lidos in Britain: a great semicircle of pale blue water about 180 feet across, cut straight against the edge of the sea, ringed by cast-iron railings, with three fountains playing around it.
Did you know? The pool was built by two major contractors, Edmund Nuttall and Sons and John Mowlem and Company, both famous for large civil engineering works.
03 Natural pools of Porto Moniz
Piscinas Naturais do Porto Moniz
Portugal · 36.4 km from Funchal32.869° N 17.170° W
Image by Olga_Fil from Pixabay At the north-western tip of Madeira, the Atlantic breaks against a shelf of black volcanic rock and spills into a chain of natural basins, where swimmers float in calm, clear seawater while waves crash a few metres away. These are the lava pools of Porto Moniz: hollows left when lava flows cooled at the edge of the sea, sheltered by ridges of dark basalt and refilled by the ocean with every high tide.
Did you know? The main pool complex holds roughly 7,600 cubic metres of seawater in a swimming area of about 3,800 square metres, around two metres deep.
04 Venetian Pool
United States · 3.8 km from Coral Gables25.746° N 80.274° W
Jesper Rautell Balle · CC BY 3.0 Venetian Pool turns a worked-out limestone quarry into a Mediterranean lagoon. Fresh water fills a basin cut from limestone, crossed by a Venetian-style bridge and lined with mooring posts and arcaded buildings; there are caves and grottoes in the rock walls, a waterfall, and an island with palm trees. Opened in 1924, it is the only swimming pool listed on the US National Register of Historic Places.
Did you know? The pool takes in about 820,000 US gallons of artesian water a day, and it has been described as the largest freshwater pool in the United States.
05 Tidal Pools of Leça da Palmeira
Piscinas de Marés de Leça da Palmeira
Portugal · 8.5 km from Porto41.193° N 8.708° W
Christian Gänshirt · CC BY-SA 4.0 On the Atlantic shore at Leça da Palmeira, just north of Porto, a young Álvaro Siza turned a public swimming bath into one of the quietest masterpieces of twentieth-century architecture. The project was drawn up in 1960 and finished in 1973, and it barely looks built at all. Two saltwater pools are tucked in among the dark granite outcrops of the beach, their edges partly formed by concrete walls and partly by the rock itself, so that at high tide the line between pool and ocean nearly disappears.
Did you know? In the anthology of 100 key buildings of the 20th century, the pools are the only Portuguese work, picked by 23 of 50 architects polled.
06 Bondi Icebergs Pool
Bondi Icebergs
Australia · 6.3 km from Sydney33.895° S 151.275° E
Kristina D.C. Hoeppner · CC BY-SA 2.0 At the southern end of Bondi Beach, the clubhouse clings to the sandstone cliff and below it a 50-metre lap pool sits right at the edge of the Pacific. On a lively day the swell rolls in and breaks straight over the seaward wall, flooding the lanes with foam while swimmers keep ploughing up and down. Seen from the cliff path above, the rectangle of blue against the white water and the long curve of the beach is one of the defining images of Sydney. A smaller children's pool lies alongside, also cut into the rock platform.
Did you know? The ocean baths are older than the club itself: Waverley Council built them at the southern end of Bondi Beach in the 1880s.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most beautiful lido in the world?
- On our list, Jubilee Pool (United Kingdom) ranks first, followed by Tinside Lido (United Kingdom) and Natural pools of Porto Moniz (Portugal).
- What is a lido?
- A lido is a public open-air swimming pool, often with sunbathing terraces. The word comes from the Lido of Venice, a beach island, and in Britain came to mean the outdoor pools built in large numbers in the 1930s.
- What is a tidal pool?
- A tidal or ocean pool is a swimming pool built on the shore and filled by the sea, either through the tide or by waves washing over its walls. The pools at Leça da Palmeira and Bondi Icebergs are both filled with seawater.
- Which country has the most beautiful lidos?
- In our collection, the most come from Portugal (2), the United Kingdom (2) and Australia (1).
- How many lidos are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 6 lidos in 4 countries. Portugal has the most, with 2.