Changelog
Beachmap is maintained continuously. This page records what changed and when: corrections owned in public, features dated, no silent rewrites of history.
Truer pictures, plainer words
- Faster everywhere: 454 beach photos recompressed (36% lighter with no visible change), the globe fetches its world data in parallel with the code, and the favicon shed 32KB.
- Fixed six beach photos that showed the wrong place (Elafonissi among them) and gave Saliara (Marble) Beach its first photo. Every replacement was checked by eye.
- Added photos for 17 more beaches that had none, from Cala Galdana to Apella and Blackpool, each verified by eye; 25 beaches stay on the satellite view until a good free photograph exists.
- Rewrote 229 beach descriptions in a plainer voice, so pages no longer open with the same sentence pattern.
- The favicon is now the Beachmap logo (it was an emoji placeholder).
- Detourmap joined the sister atlases in the footer.
Every coordinate checked
- Verified all 511 beach coordinates against country borders: zero misplaced.
- Tightened the claims around sea-temperature extremes: values are rounded, so the top is an eight-way 29°C tie on the Antalya coast and the bottom an 11°C tie across Iceland and the Faroes. The site now says so.
Real sea temperatures, better mobile map
- Every sea temperature is now a NOAA OISST v2.1 climatology: the 30-year (1995–2024) mean mid-August value at the nearest ocean cell, replacing earlier editorial estimates. Method on the About page.
- iPhone fixes: the legend and filters collapse behind a toggle, safe-area insets, no sticky hover on touch.
- The globe drags naturally now: the point you grab stays under your cursor.
Answers and embeds
- Answer-first summaries on 600+ pages and FAQs on every feature hub.
- 34 embeddable tables (per country, per month, Blue Flag) with a gallery at /embed/. Free to use with a credit link.
- Site-wide structured data for search engines and AI assistants.
511 beaches, and numbers you can cite
- Expanded to 511 beaches across 31 countries.
- New statistics page: key numbers recomputed from the data at every build.
- The dataset became downloadable (JSON, CSV, GeoJSON) with an archived DOI, and an MCP server lets AI assistants query it live.
- Dead URLs now return real 404s.
Half again more beaches
- The atlas grew from 361 to 465 beaches in one pass, with new feature and month hubs to browse them.
From map to atlas
- Per-beach pages with photos and facts, country and type hubs, and a full sitemap.
- The dataset grew from 289 to 361 beaches.
Beachmap goes live
- An interactive globe of Europe’s notable beaches, with water temperature, sand, best season, swimming and surf for each.
Spotted something wrong — a misplaced beach, a bad photo, a claim that doesn't hold? Tell us and it will be fixed and noted here. See About for how the data is made.