The photograph that sold you on Reynisfjara Beach shows black sand, basalt columns stacked like organ pipes, and the Reynisdrangar sea stacks rising out of white surf. It’s a real photograph. The beach looks exactly like that. What the photograph cannot show is the wave that ran 25 feet up dry black sand in under … Lire plus
You arrive in late November with a booking confirmation and a mental image of glassy green water. What you find instead is a 15-foot wall of white water detonating across the center of the bay, a yellow warning flag snapping in the wind, and a beach full of people watching instead of swimming. Hanalei Bay … Lire plus
The smell hits before the view does. On a June morning in Tulum’s hotel zone, the hydrogen sulfide from decomposing sargassum reaches you on the path between two palapa-roofed hotels, a low sulfur note that the Instagram photos never captured. The water in those photos is pale blue-green. The water on a bad sargassum morning … Lire plus
The ferry from Ibiza takes about 30 minutes to reach La Savina. The road north to Ses Illetes takes another 20. By the time you walk the last stretch onto the sand, the water in front of you doesn’t look like anything else in the Mediterranean. It’s not turquoise in the generic sense. It’s a … Lire plus
The parking lot at Plage de L’Espiguette is roughly 1.4 miles from the water. That’s not a navigation error. You pay at the barrier, drive to the end of the road, and then cross a dune field that the Rhône River has been building for centuries. By the time sand appears under your feet, you’re … Lire plus
Majorca gets more than 13 million visitors a year. It’s Spain’s most-visited island, and its northeast coast runs wall-to-wall with resort towers and lounge chairs stacked to the waterline. Then there’s Es Trenc, on the southern tip, where you step onto two miles of genuinely white sand and there isn’t a hotel in sight. That’s … Lire plus
Marseille is a working port city of 870,000 people. The Calanque de Sugiton sits roughly 7 miles southeast of its center. Between those two facts is a national park, a government reservation system, and a limestone trail that gains enough elevation to discourage anyone who showed up unprepared. The result is a cove with water … Lire plus
The road into Plage de Saleccia doesn’t exist, not in any sense American beach visitors expect. What exists is a 9-mile piste of loose rock and compacted dirt cutting through a protected coastal wilderness in northern Corsica. Or there’s a 30-minute boat from Saint-Florent, running on a summer schedule that deposits most passengers on the … Lire plus
You step off the motorboat from Tamandaré onto sand that’s finer than you expected. The water behind you is flat, almost glassy, and warmer than the Atlantic has any right to be. And twenty meters to the north, there’s a white chapel sitting directly on the beach. Not behind the beach. Not above it. On … Lire plus
You’re standing on a basalt plateau, 100 feet above the Atlantic, looking down through a crack in the rock. The beach is invisible from up here. You can hear it: a low compression of waves against the cliff base that you feel in your chest before you see any water. Baia do Sancho tops beach … Lire plus