10 Beaches Worth Traveling For

Reynisfjara is a black volcanic sand beach at the southern edge of Iceland, backed by a wall of hexagonal basalt columns and facing the Reynisdrangar sea stacks. There is nothing tropical about it: the sand is coarse and dark, the wind is usually doing something, and the North Atlantic arrives with real force.

It works as a landscape rather than a swimming beach. Most people spend an hour here — the basalt cliff face, the cave at the western end, the stacks offshore — then move on along the south coast.

Whitehaven is a seven-kilometre stretch of near-pure silica sand on an uninhabited national park island in the Whitsundays. The sand is unusually fine and pale, which is why the shallows read as that particular milky blue rather than standard tropical turquoise.

There is no development on the island — no bar, no hire shop, no road. Everyone arrives by boat or seaplane, spends a few hours, and leaves.

Sancho sits at the bottom of a cliff on a volcanic island 350 km off Brazil's northeast coast. The final approach is the part people remember: a set of ladders and stairs bolted into a narrow crack in the rock face, dropping you onto a small sheltered bay.

The bay is clear, calm on most days and backed by cliffs full of nesting seabirds. Because the island caps visitor numbers, it rarely feels like a mainland beach.

The Beach of the Cathedrals is a stretch of Galician coast where the Cantabrian Sea has cut arches, tunnels and flying-buttress shapes out of slate cliffs. At high tide it is a fairly ordinary northern beach with the arches standing in water.

At low tide it becomes a different place entirely: the sea pulls back far enough to walk out onto the floor and through the arches themselves.

Cannon Beach is a wide, flat, cool-water Pacific beach with a 72-metre sea stack — Haystack Rock — standing just offshore. Oregon's entire coastline is public, so the beach runs uninterrupted for miles and the town sits right behind it.

It is a walking-and-weather beach rather than a swimming one. Fog, wind and grey light are part of the experience for most of the year.

Anse Source d'Argent is a series of small coves on the west coast of La Digue, separated by weathered granite boulders that have been rounded and streaked by a couple of hundred million years of weather.

It is reached through L'Union Estate, an old coconut and vanilla plantation, and most people arrive on a bicycle because La Digue has almost no cars.

Radhanagar — often signposted as Beach No. 7 — is a two-kilometre curve of pale sand on the west side of Havelock Island in the Andaman Sea, backed by dense forest rather than development.

Because it faces west with almost no buildings behind it, it is one of the few well-known tropical beaches where the sunset happens over open water directly in front of you.

Marinha is a small cove beach set into the golden limestone cliffs of the central Algarve, with two arch formations offshore that show up in most photographs of the region.

The beach itself is modest in size, reached by a long staircase down from the clifftop. What surrounds it is arguably better: the Seven Hanging Valleys trail runs along the cliffs above, past sinkholes, arches and a string of similar coves.

Diani is a long white-sand beach on Kenya's south coast, protected by an offshore reef that keeps the lagoon calm and shallow. Behind it sits a working town rather than a resort island, plus the Colobus forest corridor where monkeys cross the road on rope bridges.

It manages to be both an easy swimming beach and a base for genuinely varied days out — reef snorkelling, the sacred Kaya Kinondo forest, Shimba Hills inland.

Hidden Beach is a small crescent of sand inside a collapsed crater on an uninhabited island off Punta de Mita, open to the sky but invisible from the sea. The only way in is a short swim through a low sea tunnel from the open water outside.

The islands are a national park and a major seabird nesting site, including blue-footed boobies, and visitor numbers are strictly capped.