About this atlas, and how it is made
2,386 beaches, 126 countries, 2,330 with twelve months of measured sea temperature.
What is on the map
Every pin is a Wikidata item. The name, the coordinates, the country, the region and the shore type are read from that item; the photograph is its Commons image, shown with its photographer and licence; the story is the opening of its Wikipedia article. 319 beaches have no Wikipedia article in any language and say so on their own page.
Shore types
- White-sand beaches · 62
- Golden-sand beaches · 83
- Black-sand beaches · 16
- Shingle beaches · 7
- Rocky shores & coves · 22
- City beaches · 19
- River & lake beaches · 10
- Naturist beaches · 19
- Beaches · 2,148
These come from the item's own Wikidata classes. Most beaches on Earth are typed only "beach", which is what the plain Beach label means here: not a judgement, but that Wikidata does not say.
The water
The sea temperature is the one number on this atlas that is a measurement rather than a record of what somebody wrote down. It is NOAA's OISST v2.1 monthly climatology for 1991 to 2020, sampled at each beach's coordinates. Twelve months, not one: a single mid-August reading is a fair summer for Nice and the end of winter for Sydney, and a worldwide atlas built that way would have been wrong for half the planet.
Questions
How were these beaches chosen?
By rule, not by taste. Every beach here is an item in Wikidata typed as a beach (or one of its subclasses) that has coordinates and a photograph on Wikimedia Commons. Most also have a Wikipedia article. No beach was added because somebody liked it, and no description on this site was written by a person or a language model.
Is this every beach in the world?
No, and it does not try to be. It is 2,386 beaches across 126 countries — the ones Wikidata records well enough to map honestly. Coverage is uneven: some countries have catalogued their whole coastline and others have a handful of entries, so a country with few pins here has few pins in Wikidata, not few beaches.
Where do the sea temperatures come from?
NOAA's OISST v2.1 monthly long-term mean for 1991 to 2020, a satellite and buoy record on a 0.25° global grid, in the public domain. Each beach is sampled at its own coordinates, at the nearest cell that is open water in all twelve months. Where the nearest such cell is more than 75 km away the beach shows no temperature at all rather than quote a different sea.
Why does a country I know well have so few beaches?
Because Wikidata has few beaches there. Spain alone holds about a third of every beach on Earth that has both a photograph and an article, because its coastline arrived as one national dataset. Rather than ship that skew, each country is capped and each coastal country is floored, and the cut inside a capped country is made on Wikipedia readership.
Can I use the data?
Yes. The facts come from Wikidata, which is CC0, and the sea temperatures from NOAA, which is in the public domain. The photographs are not ours to give away: they stay on Wikimedia Commons under their own licences, and every page names the photographer and the licence.