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
Eagle Beach runs 1.5 miles along Aruba’s southwest coast, and in places the dry sand stretches nearly 100 yards from the sea grape tree line to the water. That width isn’t geology. It’s policy. Aruba’s government restricted direct beachfront hotel construction along this corridor, so the nearest resort sits 200 to 400 yards back from … Lire plus
The ferry from Puerto Juárez takes about 20 minutes across open water that smells of diesel and warm salt. You step off at the main dock on the southern end of Isla Mujeres and walk north through a town of golf carts, painted concrete, and fish taco counters running at full speed by 8am. Three … Lire plus
The road north from Laoag runs straight through flat sugarcane country before it bends toward the coast at Bangui Bay. That’s where you first see them: a row of wind turbines turning hard in the same direction, every one of them, all year long in season. The same wind pressing those blades is the wind … Lire plus
At 7:30am on the beach in El Nido town, four clusters of wooden bangka boats load simultaneously, each tied with a different colored rope. Outboard exhaust mixes with the smell of low tide and salt-wet rope. Every tourist is heading into Bacuit Bay, and almost none of them knows the passengers in the next boat … Lire plus
The boat from Ko Phi Phi Don takes about 20 minutes across water that smells of diesel and salt. Everyone on deck has the same image loaded in their phone: pale sand, vertical limestone, Leonardo DiCaprio. That film is 25 years old. The beach it made famous was closed entirely from 2018 to 2022 because … Lire plus