Sea turtles, dolphins, tropical birds, and more in their natural habitat.
Sea turtles, dolphins, tropical birds, and more in their natural habitat.
18 beaches found
Easy AccessMonterey's quiet bay-side beach, named after an 1880 Gilded Age hotel that is now the Naval Postgraduate School. The cold-water walking beach that almost every travel guide wrongly sells as a swimming beach.
Easy AccessThe half-mile cobblestone beach in Machiasport that is not actually made of jasper, sits in frigid Down East Maine water, and makes a low rumbling sound as waves drag stones back into the sea.
Easy AccessThe West Maui beach most travel articles still call Airport Beach, named for the small Kaanapali airstrip that closed in 1986. Free parking, a reef off the sand, sea turtles in the lagoon, and underwater humpback whale song from December through March. Easier than Kaanapali next door.
ModerateA mile of soft North Shore sand with a shorebreak that has killed people who never intended to swim, and a calm summer version that looks like a different beach entirely.
Easy AccessThe reddish-sand beach two minutes south of Hana on Maui's east shore, with cone-shaped Alau Island offshore and the Ka Iwi o Pele cinder hill behind. Photograph it. Picnic on it. Do not swim in it.
ModerateThe Kauai north-east shore half-moon bay where Gilligan's Island was filmed in 1963 and almost nobody has been since. Treacherous currents in the centre, calm at the ends, no lifeguard, no facilities, and limited parking on a residential road. Quiet on purpose.
ModerateThe West Maui snorkel beach at Mile Marker 14, with 450 acres of fringing coral reef, reliable Hawaiian green sea turtle sightings, occasional manta rays, and a tide-dependent entry that the rental-car blogs rarely warn about clearly.
Easy AccessHarbour Island's three-mile east-coast beach, where a microscopic organism called Homotrema rubrum actually does make the sand pale pink. What it costs, how you get there, and why midday does not show what Instagram promised.
Hard to ReachA surreal beach hidden inside a collapsed volcanic crater on the Marietas Islands, accessible only by swimming through a tunnel at low tide. Strictly limited to 116 visitors per day.
Easy AccessThe Guanacaste crescent that reopened its marina in 2023 after a 19-year closure, where the name has nothing to do with flamingos and the sand is not actually pink. What every 2020 guide still gets wrong about Costa Rica's north Pacific showpiece.
ModerateA 7,349-hectare wildlife refuge on Nicaragua's Pacific coast where up to 50,000 olive ridley sea turtles can arrive to nest in a single night, on a beach that makes no promises about which night.
Easy AccessThe engineered bay beach the Aransas County Navigation District built in 1935, where calm green water, 65 covered picnic sites, and Texas's first Blue Wave certification make it a useful corrective to open Gulf chaos.
Easy AccessThe Kauai west-shore family beach named for the active Hawaiian salt-making ponds beside it. A reef-protected crescent that swims like a pool, lifeguards on duty, and one of the few beaches in the state where Hawaiian sea salt is still harvested by hand.
Easy AccessThe Kauai south-shore beach with the 40-foot cliff Harrison Ford jumped off in Six Days Seven Nights. The cliff is the photo, not the activity. The real reason to come is the Maha'ulepu Heritage Trail that starts behind the sand.
Easy AccessThe bay-side Orleans beach where a 9-foot tide swing turns one patch of sand into four different beaches a day, and where the Cape Cod Chamber ranks the sunset second-best on the whole Cape.
ModerateA hidden cove near Dunedin reached through a hand-carved tunnel in the sandstone cliffs, with dramatic rock formations and wild Southern Ocean coastline.
ModerateThe Kauai snorkel beach where most visitors arrive with a map that is wrong, a reservation they did not need, and a parking plan that stopped working in 2022. Get those three things right and it is still one of the most unusual reef systems in Hawaii.
Easy AccessSt Pete Beach's erosion-prone north end, defined by four rock T-groins and the $125M county renourishment that wrapped in March 2026 after Helene and Milton flattened the dune line. What actually opened, what is wider, and what to expect in April 2026.