About Beachmap
Beachmap is a free interactive map of 511 of Europe's best beaches across 31 countries — each plotted on a spinning globe with the details that matter: sea temperature, sand, best season, swimming and surf.
How the data is made
Each beach's sea-surface temperature is a real climatology, not an estimate: the 30-year (1995–2024) mean mid-August SST from NOAA OISST v2.1 (public-domain US Government data), sampled at the nearest ocean grid cell to each beach. It is a typical warm-season value, rounded — indicative of what to expect, not a live reading, and it varies year to year. The beach selection, categories and written descriptions are an editorial compilation assembled with AI assistance and organised into one open dataset, with coordinates, best months and Blue Flag status compiled from public sources. Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and are credited to their photographers on every page.
Reuse the data (CC BY 4.0)
The dataset is free to use for articles, research, apps and maps under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: credit “Beachmap” and link to europebeachmap.com. Download it as JSON, CSV or GeoJSON (drop the GeoJSON straight into QGIS, Felt or geojson.io):
https://europebeachmap.com/data/beaches.json
https://europebeachmap.com/data/beaches.csv
https://europebeachmap.com/data/beaches.geojsonAI assistants can query the same data live over the Model Context Protocol — see the Beachmap MCP server.
The dataset is also mirrored on GitHub, Hugging Face and Kaggle, and archived with a citable DOI on Zenodo: 10.5281/zenodo.21322042.
Ready-made credit line:
Beach data: <a href="https://europebeachmap.com">Beachmap — map of Europe's beaches</a> (CC BY 4.0)Note: the photos are not covered by this licence — each carries its own Wikimedia Commons licence, credited on its beach page.
Popular starting points
- Sea temperature at Europe's beaches, ranked
- White-sand beaches in Europe
- Blue Flag beaches in Europe
- European beach statistics — the key numbers
- Changelog — what changed and when
- All 511 beaches, by country and type
Sister atlases
Beachmap is part of a small family of independent travel atlases: TrainRouter (legendary train journeys), Sunshine Atlas (where the sun is), Castlemap (Europe's castles) and Detourmap (places worth a detour, worldwide).
Reuse this data
The sea-temperature table and beach data are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 — credit “Beachmap” with a link. Copy a ready-made credit:
<a href="https://europebeachmap.com/best-beaches/sea-temperature/">Sea temperature at Europe's beaches — Beachmap</a>Or embed the live top-30 table — it updates as the atlas grows; keep the source line under it:
<iframe src="https://europebeachmap.com/embed/sea-temperature/" width="100%" height="480" style="border:0;border-radius:12px" loading="lazy" title="Sea temperature at Europe's beaches — Beachmap"></iframe>
<p>Source: <a href="https://europebeachmap.com/best-beaches/sea-temperature/">Sea temperature at Europe's beaches — Beachmap</a> (CC BY 4.0)</p>Prefer raw data? Download the full dataset: beaches.json — 511 beaches with coordinates, sea temperature, sand, season, swimming and surf. See About & data, or browse every embeddable table in the widget gallery.