Just a short metro ride from the centre of Copenhagen, Amager Strandpark is a popular beach park that gives the Danish capital its own stretch of sand and sea. Created in its present form in 2005, the park added a two-kilometre artificial island just offshore, separated from the original shore by a shallow lagoon, greatly expanding the city seaside playground. The design cleverly created two very different bathing experiences. The calm, shallow lagoon between the island and the mainland is idea.....

A converted barge moored in the River Spree in the Treptow district of Berlin, the Badeschiff is one of the city's most distinctive summer attractions, an open-air swimming pool floating on the water itself, surrounded by a popular beach bar and sun decks. The name translates roughly as bathing ship, and the concept arose in the mid-2000s as an inventive response to the wish to swim safely in the heart of a city whose own river is not suitable for bathing: rather than swim in the Spree, visitors.....

Stretching along the northern coast of the small island of Koh Hey, around nine kilometres south of the southern tip of the main island of Phuket, Banana Beach is one of the principal day-trip beach destinations for visitors based on the southern Phuket coast. The beach takes its name from the curved banana-like shape of the white sand strip, which arcs across approximately seven hundred metres of the northern coast and forms one of the most photogenic small beach landscapes anywhere in the surr.....

Together with neighbouring Barceloneta, Platja de Sant Sebastia is the oldest and most traditional beach in Barcelona. It lies at the western end of the city's shoreline, in the Ciutat Vella district, and takes its name from the former Sant Sebastia baths, among the first public bathing facilities in the city and originally the preserve of the well-to-do classes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At roughly a kilometre in length it is also one of Barcelona's longest beaches, and it is r.....

Few stretches of sand carry the global recognition of Bondi Beach, a roughly one-kilometre crescent of pale sand and rolling surf on the eastern edge of Sydney. Its name comes from an Aboriginal word generally taken to mean the sound of water breaking on rocks, and for more than a century it has been a public playground rather than a private resort, with free access written into its identity. The beach is patrolled by the surf lifesavers whose red and yellow flags, and whose history reaching bac.....

Brighton Beach runs along the seafront of Brighton and Hove on the East Sussex coast, a broad stretch of shingle backed by the city's promenades, Regency terraces and amusements. Unlike the sandy resorts further west, it is a classic pebble beach, sloping down to the sea between timber groynes that divide it into bays and help hold the shingle in place. The beach stretches either side of Brighton Palace Pier, with Madeira Drive and the lower esplanade running along its eastern length and the Kin.....

A substantial sandy beach extending for approximately one and a half kilometres along the central Atlantic coast immediately west of the small coastal town of Carcavelos, around fifteen kilometres west of central Lisbon, Carcavelos Beach is one of the principal continuing summer destinations of the wider central Portuguese capital. The beach lies along the principal western Tagus estuary coast and is the largest individual sandy beach within the immediate commuter belt of central Lisbon. The pr.....

On the northern bank of the Elbe, just west of Hamburg's harbour, a surprising ribbon of sand stretches for several kilometres past the old fishing village of Oevelgoenne and the suburb of Othmarschen, the city beach known to everyone as the Elbstrand. It is not a seaside resort but a working river shore, and that is precisely its charm: sunbathers and picnickers spread out on the sand within touching distance of one of Europe's busiest waterways, while vast container ships, tugs and ferries gli.....

English Bay, on the western edge of downtown Vancouver, is the city's best-known beach, a broad crescent of sand at the foot of the West End where the towers of the city give way to the open water and the mountains of the North Shore rise across the inlet. Known affectionately to locals as First Beach, it sits at the southern end of the seawall that runs around Stanley Park and has long been the heart of summer life in the city, drawing crowds to swim, sunbathe, picnic and stroll, and famous abo.....

A small, sheltered cove on the rocky shoreline between Manly and Shelly Beach, Fairy Bower Beach is one of the quieter corners of Sydney's northern beaches, valued more for its rock pools and calm water than for surf. It sits along the Marine Parade walkway that links Manly's main ocean beach to the protected waters of Cabbage Tree Bay, and its modest strip of sand and tidal pools give it an intimate feel far removed from the busier beach nearby. The cove's best-known feature is the Fairy Bower.....