In 2016, nearly 40,000 New Zealanders crowdfunded a beach so it could never be sold privately. Ten years later, a $20-million conservation project has finished restoring the birds that vanished from the forest behind it, and handed the work back to the country that bought the sand.
Praia da Marinha, Cala Goloritzé and Reynisfjara photograph beautifully — and each one hides a different logistical catch: roughly 150 steps down a cliff, a mandatory online booking, or a sea that has killed people who turned their back on it. Here is what to know before you go.
In August, Praia da Marinha fills with umbrellas and tour boats under the Algarve's strongest sun. About 8,500 km away, in that same calendar week, Robberg Beach sits cold and quiet — because that's exactly when southern right whales arrive there to give birth.
Not every beach labelled 'family-friendly' works the same way. We checked four beaches on four continents — from Crete's pink-sand lagoon to a geothermal sandpit in New Zealand — against real sources, to see what actually makes each one safe, or not, for kids.
In November 2025, nineteen Garden Route beaches were awarded Blue Flag status — more than any other region in South Africa. Among them is Nature's Valley, the finish line of the Otter Trail and gateway to Robberg, where a cave holds 125,000 years of human history.
Not all sand is equal. In Crete, pigmented microorganisms tint the coast pink; in Iceland, volcanic basalt turns the shore black; in Australia, near-pure silica keeps the ground cool underfoot. Three real beaches, three genuinely distinct geological stories.
Lagoons and reefs where children can walk hundreds of metres without losing the bottom.
Trails from 20 minutes to three hours, with path conditions and what to carry.
Only two European coasts are genuinely warmer in October than June — the rest come close, with the crowds gone and rooms at a fraction of summer prices.
Brazil's northeast coast has two world-famous beaches the law protects for almost opposite reasons. One sits inside a marine park founded in 1988 and funded by a daily conservation fee. The other is a sanctuary of shifting dunes whose name, in the Tupi language, means turtle burrow.
Ask who invented the overwater bungalow and you will hear two hotel names, two islands and at least one contested year. What nobody disputes is that the design born on a Society Islands beach went on to define lagoon tourism, from the Maldives to Fiji.
On Argentina's Atlantic Coast, two of the country's best-known beach towns started from opposite premises. One grew around a 19th-century railway and a hotel that gave its beach a name; the other began as 16 square kilometres of shifting dune that had to be planted into stillness.
Off Nosy Be, in northern Madagascar, swim whales from a species science only documented alive for the first time in 2015. Before that, Omura's whale was known only from stranded specimens and research-vessel catches — never filmed in the open ocean.
Andilana and Ambatoloaka look like ordinary tropical beaches — until you notice the plantations just inland. Nosy Be earned its old name, 'the scented island,' from the ylang-ylang grown here, which ends up, after plenty of distillation, in some of the world's most famous perfumes.
Not every beach labelled 'reef' puts coral within arm's reach of your towel. From Moorea's walk-in lagoon to the Seychelles' tide-timed granite pools and Fernando de Noronha's cliff-locked cove: what actually happens when you try to reach the water at three real reef beaches, and what to pack.
On Zanzibar's east coast, low tide can pull the sea back more than a kilometre. At the island's northern tip, though, Nungwi and Kendwa rarely run dry — and the reason has less to do with the tide itself than with the shape of the seabed.
On Fiji's Coral Coast, five reef breaks share roughly 80 km of coastline — one gentle enough for a first lesson, another rated Advanced and compared to Cloudbreak itself. Here's which wave suits which surfer, and when each one actually turns on.
Mauritius is almost completely ringed by a coral reef, which is why its lagoons stay calm no matter which coast you choose. On the island's north shore, Trou aux Biches has drawn swimmers for decades; on the west, Flic en Flac now watches that same sea creep closer each year.
Diani's seventeen kilometres of reef-sheltered sand and Watamu's coral gardens, protected since 1968 inside one of Kenya's first marine parks, sit 170 kilometres apart on the same coastline, patrolled by the very same sea-turtle charity, in two entirely different ways.
