The most beautiful beach towns in the world

From Praiano's uncrowded Amalfi cliffs to a St. John harbor where the live-aboard sailing community outnumbers the tourists

Martina Jorden / Unsplash

The beach town’s appeal is structural: the natural environment and the built one are in close, productive dialogue in a way that purely urban and purely wild places are not. The boats in the harbor catch the light the same way the fishing boats that inspired the harbor’s construction caught it a century ago. The whitewashed cottages on the cliff have absorbed enough salt air to carry the coast in their paint. The boardwalk between the sea and the restaurants exists because the people who built the restaurants wanted to be near the water, and the people who come to eat there want the same thing. This proximity creates the specific atmospheric quality that the best beach towns share across geography and culture: a place where slowing down is not a choice but an environmental inevitability.

What distinguishes the most beautiful beach towns from the merely pleasant ones is usually specific natural drama, specific architectural character, and the absence of the commercial over-development that removes both. Praiano on the Amalfi Coast has all three: the cliff-edge position, the medieval village fabric, and the relative absence of the crowds that have overwhelmed its neighbor, Positano. St. Ives in Cornwall has all three: the turquoise bay, the fishermen’s cottages converted into galleries, and the winding lanes too narrow for tourist buses. The best beach towns are always the ones that have managed to stay themselves.

The 10 towns below appear in Travel Leisure, drawn from a larger list nominated by travel experts and editors, spanning six countries across four continents. They range from small Italian cliff villages accessible only by a winding coastal road to a Japanese port town reachable on a luxury express train from Tokyo, with stops in Cornwall, Maine, Costa Rica, and the Pacific coast of Mexico.

1. Praiano offers Amalfi cliffs without Positano’s crowds

Praiano is the Amalfi Coast town that gives travelers who have found Positano overwhelming the same essential experience at a more human scale. The small town hugs the cliffs, with views in every direction: terraced gardens descending to the water, the sea extending toward Capri on a clear day, and the lights of other coastal towns visible at night across the water. The nearby beach beneath the Fiordo di Furore bridge provides the swimming program with a dramatic setting, unique to the geological formations of this stretch of coast. The Fiordo di Furore beach, accessible by steps cut into the cliff face, sits in a narrow fjord where the sheer rock walls meet the water, a configuration that has made it one of the most photographed small beaches in Italy.

Casa Angelina, perched high above the water on Praiano’s cliff, gives the lodging program its most committed expression of the location’s visual drama: the hotel’s white-on-white interior and the terrace views over the piercingly blue Tyrrhenian Sea give the accommodation a visual identity specific to the cliffside Amalfi architecture tradition. Il Pirata, a restaurant carved into the rocks above the water, provides the dinner program with a setting appropriate to a celebration on this coastline.

The road between Praiano and Positano gives the comparison its most practical context: the two towns are close enough to visit each other in an afternoon, and the difference in crowd density is apparent from the moment the driver parks. Positano’s main beach is often shoulder-to-shoulder from June through September, while Praiano’s equivalent attracts a fraction of the volume. For the traveler who wants the Amalfi experience without the Positano price and population, Praiano is the answer the coast offers. The walk between the two towns, along the clifftop footpath that connects the villages of the Amalfi, takes a few hours and gives views of the coastline from a height and distance that neither town’s beach provides.

2. Nosara in Costa Rica is the barefoot surf town made real

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Nosara is a surf town on Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula that has maintained its barefoot, jungle-meets-sand character through a development policy that limits infrastructure expansion and maintains the tree canopy that gives the town its distinctly non-resort atmosphere. The unpaved roads that connect the town’s scattered restaurants and accommodations, the howler monkeys audible from the beach at dawn, and the Pacific surf that breaks consistently enough to support a surf school industry alongside a serious local surfing culture give Nosara a specific character that the more developed Costa Rican beach towns have traded away.

The surf break at Playa Guiones, the town’s main beach, is one of the most consistent in Central America: the long, sandy bottom and the offshore wind pattern give the wave a shape and duration that beginners and intermediate surfers find productive, and the absence of the reef and rock that make other Costa Rican breaks dangerous for learners gives Guiones a safety profile appropriate to the surf school concentration the beach has attracted. The beach itself, backed by the protected Nosara Wildlife Refuge forest, gives the setting a natural buffer from the town’s development that maintains the tree line the toucans and scarlet macaws require.

The food and social culture give Nosara its evening program: open-air restaurants with partial walls, ceviche and fresh fish from the Pacific, and cocktails with local tropical fruit give the night a specifically Costa Rican beach town character whose casual intimacy reflects the town’s scale and philosophy. The four-wheel-drive rental culture, necessary to navigate the town’s roads during and after the rainy season, gives the visit a logistical engagement with the environment that the paved-road beach towns........

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