What's new on World Beach Map

A small atlas, kept honestly: every change a reader would notice lands here, newest first: new pages, data corrections, design, and the fixes worth admitting to.

Follow it by feed: /changelog/feed.xml (Atom). Spotted an error in the data? ceoflightmussy@gmail.com. Corrections are welcome, and they are most of what the entries below are made of.

24 October 2026: 4,130 beaches, and every new photograph looked at

• The atlas grows from 2,386 beaches in 126 countries to 4,130 in 127, by the same rules, applied further. Where a beach’s Wikidata record names no photograph, the lead photograph of its own Wikipedia article now counts. A beach no Wikipedia has written up is admitted in every country with a coast after every beach that has an article, instead of only to make up a minimum of 45: that brings in Rondinara in Corsica, Makapuʻu on Oʻahu and the beach at Deauville, each written up inside its town’s article rather than in its own. Places Wikidata files as a cove, a park or a bathing beach outside its class of beaches, Pig Beach in the Exumas among them, were read one by one and added. And no country may contribute more than 600 beaches instead of 400, a cap only Spain reaches, whose share of the map still falls. How the atlas chooses says it in full.
• Every new photograph was looked at before it went on the map: 2,263 of them, and 505 were turned down. Maps, station platforms, signs, statues, old postcards, crowds and surfers, and views of cliffs, of the sea from a boat or of the town behind the sand, in which no beach can be seen. A beach whose only photograph shows no beach is left off until Commons has one, and a beach already on the map whose Wikidata photograph changed for the worse keeps the one it had.
• Not beaches. Ten salt flats in the Andes, typed “beach” on Wikidata for the Spanish playa, which also names a dry lake bed, and two sand spits had been on the map since August. Their pages now answer 410 Gone, and so do the pages for Bolivia and Turkmenistan, whose only beaches they were.
• Countries put right. Shivrajpur beach is in India; its record named the state of Gujarat as its country. Golden Beach on the Karpas peninsula is filed under Cyprus: its record named Northern Cyprus, which only Turkey recognises, and the atlas follows the rule it already applies to Crimea. The two old country pages forward to the new ones. Nineteen beaches whose records name no country at all, Lorne and Apollo Bay among them, are placed by their own coordinates, and Muisne Beach is in Ecuador, not Indonesia.
• One photograph, one beach. Where the same picture stood for two beaches, it was one beach recorded twice under two names (Porto Ferro and the Spiaggia di Porto Ferro) or a beach borrowing its neighbour’s photograph. It now stands for one, and the second pin is gone.

21 October 2026: Back on the air, with a new card, a new panel and new pages

• The atlas is back. From 7 September to 21 October every address here sent its readers on to Movie Scene Map while the maker worked on the sister maps. Nothing about the beaches, the photographs or the NOAA sea temperatures changed in between.
• Alpha. The name on the map carries an alpha tag now, as Movie Scene Map carries its beta: the atlas is far from finished, and says so where every reader starts.
• The map is flat now, drawn the way the sister maps draw theirs. The globe showed one half of the planet at a time; the flat map opens on the whole world at once, and pans and zooms like Castle Map, World Train Map and Movie Scene Map.
• A new card, the one the sister maps use. The shore type, the fame and the ranks are chips along the top, with the close button at their end once the card is pinned; Full page stands beside the beach’s name; the country carries its flag as a picture; and every photograph names its photographer and its licence. Very wide panoramas are cropped to a band instead of shrinking to a ribbon, and the photograph’s shape is known before it arrives, so the card no longer grows under the cursor.
• A new panel. The search sits at the top and closes when you press anywhere else; Browse, Surprise me, Sea temperature and About are one row of buttons; the month the sea is painted for is always in view, with the colour scale under it; and shore type, fame and the warmest month share one Filters fold, with a button that brings every beach back. A switch beside the name turns the map and every page to the day theme.
• On a phone the search is a bar of its own and the four buttons share one row under it; the pinned card arrives as a sheet that shows whole; the map opens on the whole height of the world, from the Arctic down to the latitude of Cape Horn; and on an iPhone the map runs on under Safari’s toolbar and status bar.
• The map moves better. A drag let go glides on and slows evenly; hovering a beach no longer dims the whole map; the map’s credits fold to their (i) five seconds after it appears; and the map library is the current MapLibre 6, which closes a security flaw in every earlier version.
• New pages. Every page has a header with the atlas’s sections and the day theme switch, a strip inviting partners at the top, and a Buy me a coffee button for anyone who wants to support the maker; a beach’s page leads with its photograph across the page and sets its facts beside the story; flags are pictures everywhere; and the about page introduces the studio and the four sister maps.
• Photographers are named, not their notes. 122 photo credits printed whatever the photograph’s Commons author field held: an e-mail address under three Algarve beaches, “The original uploader was …”, a talk-page link, a Flickr address in place of a name. They now print the name, and where a link was all there was, the account it points at.
• The privacy notice names the two new links every page carries, Buy me a coffee and the studio, neither of which loads anything until it is followed. It now also names Cloudflare, which has carried this site’s traffic since 5 September and should have been named from that day, and the cookie Cloudflare sets after a security check. The optional click and mouse-movement measurement did not come back with the atlas: nothing offers it any more, and the identifier it kept in a browser that said yes is deleted on the next visit.

1 September 2026: The atlas has a new address: beachmapworld.com

• This map lives at beachmapworld.com now. It was europebeachmap.com, and that name stopped being true on 30 August, when the atlas left Europe and became a globe of 2,386 beaches in 128 countries. A reader who saw the old address had already been told something false about the map before they arrived at it.
• Every link anyone has ever made to the old address still works. europebeachmap.com and its www both answer with a permanent redirect that keeps the path (the old address of a beach lands on that same beach) in a single hop, and they will keep doing so. The redirect is served over the old name’s own certificate, which goes on renewing on purpose: a redirect behind an expired certificate is a browser warning page, not a redirect, and every link the atlas earned under the old name would dead-end at it.
• Two things deliberately keep answering at the old address rather than redirecting: the Model Context Protocol endpoint, because the assistants that call it read a redirect as a protocol error instead of a new address, and the key that proves this site owns its entry in the MCP registry, which is registered under the old name. Both also answer at the new one.
• Nothing about the beaches, the photographs or the twelve months of NOAA sea temperature changed today. This was a move, not an edit: the open dataset is the same file it was yesterday, at a new address.
• The panel points at the rest of the network. The pages have carried a line of sister atlases in their footer since the rebuild, but the map itself carried none, and the map is where most readers stay, so anyone who never left the globe never learnt the others existed. The foot of the panel now names Castlemap, World Train Map and FilmMap, and links the account that publishes them, drawn the way the castle atlas draws its own.

1 September 2026: The card reads a whole year, and the privacy notice says what this site actually records

• The card names the coldest month as well as the warmest. A summer peak of 23 °C reads the same at Coney Island and at Bondi, and it is the winter that tells them apart: 4 °C against 19 °C. Both ends are read from the same twelve NOAA monthly means the coloured strip above them draws, so nothing new was estimated to say it.
• The card stopped apologising. The line explaining that a beach had no Wikipedia article yet has left it. It was the only sentence on the card about the atlas rather than about the beach, and a card is asked three questions: where is this, what shore is it, how warm is the water. The beaches with no article still say so on their own pages, which is where a reader who wants the story has gone looking.
• The globe button has left the map. It floated in the bottom right corner, a second round control directly above the zoom, and it did what dragging the globe and zooming out already do.
• The privacy notice is a full one again. Visits here have been counted by a small script served from this domain since 25 July, but the rebuild on 30 August replaced the notice with three paragraphs that described only the web server’s logs. The page now sets out what the counting records and what it deliberately does not do (no cookie, no browser storage, no stored IP address, no way to look a visit up afterwards), alongside the optional click and mouse-movement measurement, its on and off switch, and the three organisations your browser fetches things from: OpenFreeMap for the map, Amazon Web Services for the terrain, and Wikimedia Commons for the photographs.
• This changelog is back, with an Atom feed to follow it by. It went missing in the rebuild along with the pages it described; everything below the 30 August entry is what the European edition published, kept because a changelog that starts on the day of a rewrite is a changelog that has been tidied.
• Search-engine crawlers are asked again to leave the visit counter’s two addresses alone, so that crawl budget goes on beaches.

31 August 2026: A card that leads with the beach, a map painted by one thing, and a new mark

• The hover card was rebuilt around the photograph. The beach’s name is the biggest thing on it now. It used to be set smaller than the temperature beneath it, so the card led with a number and buried what the number was about. The shore type is a solid chip carrying the colour of the dot you just hovered; the photograph keeps its own shape up to a cap instead of being cropped to a letterbox, which is what a panorama is for; the photographer’s name sits on every card rather than only on pinned ones, because most Commons licences ask for it wherever the picture is shown; and the links to the full page and to Wikipedia are visible before you pin, so that you can see there is more.
• The card no longer prints the opening of the Wikipedia article. Three clamped lines of encyclopedia cost it a third of its height and answered none of the questions a beach card is asked. The prose is one click away on the beach’s own page.
• The map is painted by the sea, always. It used to offer three ways to colour the same dots (sea temperature, shore type, fame), and only the first was a measurement; the other two spent the dots’ colour re-encoding what the card says in words, and each dragged its own legend along behind it. Shore type stays as a filter and fame gained a section of its own, which is more than either had.
• The panel folds. It used to print everything it had, always: nine temperature bands, their provenance note and nine region chips, 554 px of controls on a 900 px window. It is three closed sections now, each with a badge saying how much of the atlas is switched on, and the search, the month slider and the ways out stay in the open.
• The four ways off the globe moved to the top of the panel and became pressable blocks. They were 11 px text links at the foot of it, under the fold, which is where a reader looks last, and they are the door into the pages search engines actually find.
• A new mark: a palm on deep water, in two colours, drawn rather than assembled. It is the favicon, the loading mark and the header lockup, defined once instead of four times.

30 August 2026: The atlas is worldwide, and every fact on it can be traced

• 511 European beaches became 2,386 beaches in 126 countries, and the way they got here changed: every one is a Wikidata item with coordinates and a photograph on Wikimedia Commons, chosen by rule rather than by taste. The rules are written down on the about page: a cap of 400 beaches per country, because Spain alone holds about a third of the world’s photographed and articled beaches; a floor, so that a country does not read as empty when the truth is that Wikidata has not catalogued it; and no spits or barrier islands, because the Curonian Spit is not a beach.
• The sea temperature is a measurement now, twelve times over. Every beach carries twelve monthly means from NOAA’s OISST v2.1 climatology for 1991 to 2020, sampled at its own coordinates: the colour of the dots, the month by month pages, the slider on the map and the year strip on every card all read from those. A beach whose nearest open-water cell is too far away shows no temperature at all rather than quoting a different sea.
• The map is a globe. It is drawn with MapLibre on the night style the sister atlases share, and rendered as a sphere rather than flattened: coastlines run around a planet, and a flat projection cuts the Pacific in half.
• A ranking bug worth admitting: three beaches in Ceuta had been credited with the city of Ceuta’s 1,449,772 Wikipedia readers and ranked the three most famous beaches on Earth, ahead of Omaha Beach and Copacabana. A Wikidata sitelink can point at a redirect, and for beaches it constantly does; readership is now counted against the article that is really there.
• The old site’s indexed addresses are answered deliberately rather than left to rot: a redirect where the beach survived the rebuild, and an honest "gone" where it did not.
• The open data and the MCP server were rebuilt on the new dataset, so an assistant asked for the warmest sea in February answers from the same twelve monthly means the map is painted with.

Everything below belongs to the earlier, Europe-only edition of this atlas: 511 beaches whose selection and descriptions were compiled with a language model, replaced on 30 August 2026 by the rebuild above. The entries are kept as they were published, and some of the pages and features they mention no longer exist.

18 July 2026: 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.

15 July 2026: 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.

14 July 2026: Real sea temperatures, better mobile map

• Every sea temperature is now a NOAA OISST v2.1 climatology: the 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.

13 July 2026: 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 of their own. Free to use with a credit link.
• Site-wide structured data for search engines and AI assistants.

12 July 2026: 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.

11 July 2026: Half again more beaches

• The atlas grew from 361 to 465 beaches in one pass, with new feature and month hubs to browse them.

10 July 2026: 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.

9 July 2026: Beachmap goes live

• An interactive globe of Europe’s notable beaches, with water temperature, sand, best season, swimming and surf for each.