Beaches & Water
Beaches, swimming spots, river pools and coves, with notes on access, tides and when they get crowded.
Collections
- The beaches of Rio de Janeiro — Rio's shoreline is three different coasts. The bay beaches inside Guanabara are for looking and running, not swimming. The south zone ocean…
- Stockholm's badplatser, the swimming spots the city keeps — Stockholm's city bathing places are a municipal system, not a scattering of nice spots: each registered site has an EU bathing water ID, ge…
- Munich's Freibäder, the open-air baths the Stadtwerke run — Munich's municipal open-air baths all answer to the same operator, the same 6,30 € day ticket and the same weather rule: the closing time i…
- Vienna's summer baths the city runs — Vienna's municipal baths are run by a single city department, MA 44, which means one price list across the lot: 8.10 euros a day for an adu…
- Barcelona's city beaches — Barcelona's shoreline is largely engineering. The northern stretch was laid out when the city turned its waterfront around for the 1992 Oly…
- Seattle's swimming beaches the Parks Department runs — Seattle guards its freshwater swimming from a fixed calendar: some beaches open May 23 and shut in late August, others wait until June 27 a…
- Chicago's lakefront beaches the Park District runs — Chicago has 26 miles of free lakefront and a single agency running the beaches along it, with one set of rules that applies everywhere: swi…
- Zürich's badis, the lake and river baths the city runs — Zurich puts its swimming where the water already is: wooden decks bolted to the lakeshore, channels cut into the Limmat, a canal bath behin…
- Corsica's hidden coves, reachable only on foot or by boat — Coves on the Corsican coast where the last stretch has to be walked or motored, from the mule track over the Col de la Croix to the offshor…
- Cape Peninsula tidal pools cut into the rock — The peninsula puts two very different seas within half an hour of each other, and the tidal pools make the contrast measurable. False Bay w…
- Sydney's ocean pools cut into the rock — Concrete tanks blasted into the sandstone shelf between Palm Beach and Cronulla, filled and flushed by the swell that breaks over their sea…