Bondi is barely a kilometre long; Copacabana runs about four. Neither comes close. The beaches here start at 74 km and top out at 254 km, spread across nine countries and five continents. Two rules decide who qualifies. The first is what gets measured: one continuous sandy shore under a single name, so a coast broken by a major tidal inlet counts as the separate runs it actually is. That is why France appears below with its unbroken 106 km Landes shore rather than the 230 km Côte d'Argent figure, which leaps the mouth of Arcachon Bay. The second rule is that the sand has to be there today, and walkable. Between them those two rules cost the list some famous names. Chennai's Marina Beach, routinely called the longest in Asia, is about 13 km. Nigeria's Ibeno Beach, widely reported at three times its true length, measures around 30 km. And Portugal's Troia Peninsula, at 64.8 km, misses the cut by a single place.
12 Longest Beaches in the World (2026)
The record The longest beach in the world is Praia do Cassino, in Brazil — 254 km (158 mi), beach length. Source: Guinness World Records (1994) via Wikipedia. Verified .
Longest Beaches in the World The Ranking at a Glance
Fun Facts About the World's Longest Beaches
- The record has stood since 1994, but the number has not. Guinness World Records recognised Praia do Cassino as the world's longest beach, yet published measurements of it range from 212 km to 254 km — the coastline paradox means the finer you trace a shore, the longer it gets.
- Three of these beaches are named after the wrong number. Eighty Mile Beach is really about 137 miles, Ninety Mile Beach in New Zealand is only 55, and Ninety Mile Beach in Victoria overshoots at roughly 94. Only 75 Mile Beach is telling the truth.
- One beach is longer than the peninsula it runs along. The Younghusband Peninsula measures about 110 km, but the Coorong beach on its seaward side runs 194 km, carrying on down the coast well past the landform it is named for.
- Several of them are legally roads. 75 Mile Beach is a gazetted highway that doubles as an airstrip, and Ninety Mile Beach in New Zealand is an official road that tour buses still drive at low tide.
- The longest undeveloped barrier island on Earth is in Texas. Padre Island National Seashore protects 105.4 km of it, and the wildest southern stretches are reachable only by four-wheel drive.
- One entry is split between two countries. The Curonian Spit runs from Lithuania into Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, and its dunes — the tallest in northern Europe — buried some fourteen villages between the 16th and 19th centuries.
1. Praia do Cassino
At 254 km, Praia do Cassino is the longest continuous beach on Earth, a title Guinness World Records has recognised since 1994. It runs from the breakwaters at the entrance to the Rio Grande seaport in the south of Brazil all the way to the mouth of the Chuí Stream on the Uruguayan border — a single unbroken line of pale grey sand with low dunes and grassland behind it and almost nothing else.
The figure is not as settled as the record makes it sound. Published measurements range from 212 km to 254 km, because the answer depends entirely on how finely you trace the shoreline, a problem known as the coastline paradox. What is not in doubt is the emptiness. The northern end at Cassino itself is a proper resort town serving the city of Rio Grande, but walk south and the buildings thin, then stop, and the sand simply keeps going.
2. Eighty Mile Beach
Eighty Mile Beach measures 220 km, which makes its name a serious understatement — eighty miles would be about 129 km. It curves between Cape Missiessy and Cape Keraudren on the remote northwest coast of Western Australia, roughly halfway between Broome and Port Hedland, at the point where the Great Sandy Desert runs straight into the Indian Ocean.
It is a genuine contender for the longest beach anywhere, and the only reason it sits second rather than first is a question of definition. The coastal scientist Andrew Short records eight tidal creeks crossing the sand, along with stretches of exposed beachrock, which is why strict measures of unbroken shoreline rank the Coorong ahead of it. The beach is a Ramsar wetland of international importance and one of Australia's most significant sites for migratory shorebirds, and its shell beds draw collectors from across the country.
3. The Coorong
At 194 km, the Coorong is the longest continuous beach in Australia — a claim that sits oddly next to Eighty Mile Beach's bigger number until you remember those eight creeks. Measured from Cape Jaffa northwest to the Murray Mouth in South Australia, this is one genuinely unbroken run of sand along the seaward face of the Younghusband Peninsula.
Curiously, the beach is longer than the landform it is named for: the peninsula itself runs about 110 km, while the sand continues well beyond it down the coast. Behind the dunes sits the Coorong lagoon, a narrow Ramsar-listed estuary at the tail of the River Murray, separated from the Southern Ocean by a strip of sand less than 3 km across at its widest. The ranking comes from Professor Andy Short, who spent fourteen years visiting all 11,761 beaches on mainland Australia and Tasmania.
4. Ninety Mile Beach, Victoria
Ninety Mile Beach runs 151 km, comfortably more than the ninety miles of its name, which works out at about 145 km. It stretches northeast from a spit near Port Albert to the artificial channel cut at Lakes Entrance, separating the Gippsland Lakes from the open water of Bass Strait along Victoria's southeastern edge.
What makes it remarkable is how little interrupts it: there are no rocky headlands or wave-cut platforms anywhere along its length, just sand, dune and surf repeating for a hundred and fifty kilometres. It is one of the few beaches in the world long enough and consistent enough to carry a designated four-wheel-drive route, though shifting sand and tides make that a serious undertaking rather than a scenic drive. Depending on which measuring basis a list uses, it is often ranked the third or fourth longest uninterrupted beach on the planet.
5. Cox's Bazar Beach
Cox's Bazar Beach measures 120 km, level with 75 Mile Beach — the two share this rank, and on the figures available neither outranks the other. It runs down the southeastern coast of Bangladesh along the Bay of Bengal, and it is comfortably the longest natural sea beach in Asia.
The scoping of that claim is worth noticing. Bangladesh promotes Cox's Bazar as the longest natural sea beach in the world, while encyclopedic sources carefully limit the title to Asia, and the gap between those two statements is really a disagreement about what counts as natural and what counts as unbroken. Either way it is the outlier on this list in one respect: where most of these giants are empty enough to walk for hours without seeing anyone, Cox's Bazar is a major resort destination and the best-known holiday spot in the country.
6. 75 Mile Beach
75 Mile Beach is 120 km long, which is exactly seventy-five miles, making it the rare beach on this list whose name is precisely right. It is tied with Cox's Bazar at this rank. The sand runs along most of the east coast of K'gari, once known as Fraser Island, off the Queensland coast — the largest sand island in the world.
It functions as a gazetted highway, treated in law like any other road, and doubles as a landing strip for light aircraft. Along its length are the rusting hull of the Maheno, the natural rock pools known as the Champagne Pools, and the dark volcanic outcrop of Indian Head. Swimming is emphatically not the attraction here: strong currents and a substantial shark population make the water dangerous, and the beach is best treated as a driving and walking route rather than a bathing one.
7. Landes Coast
The Landes coast runs 106 km of near-unbroken sand from the entrance of Arcachon Bay south to the mouth of the Adour at Bayonne, backed the entire way by a dune ridge and the vast maritime pine forest planted behind it. French tourist authorities bill it as the largest beach in Europe, though Portugal's Troia Peninsula claims a similar title on a stricter reading of what counts as uninterrupted.
This stretch is the defensible half of a much larger claim. The Côte d'Argent as a whole is quoted at 230 km, measured from the Gironde estuary to the Adour, but that figure steps straight across the mouth of Arcachon Bay, which is a major tidal inlet rather than a technicality. Strung along the honest 106 km are fifteen or so resort towns — Biscarrosse, Mimizan, Hossegor, Capbreton — and some of the most consistent surf in Europe.
8. Padre Island National Seashore
Padre Island National Seashore protects 105.4 km of Gulf beach on the Texas coast, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island anywhere in the world. Padre Island in full runs about 182 km, but a navigation channel divides it, and the National Seashore covers the wild northern portion where the road runs out and the sand takes over.
The further south you drive, the emptier it gets, and the last stretches are reachable only by four-wheel drive over soft sand. The protection is not just scenic: this is the sea turtle nesting stronghold of the Texas coast, above all for the Kemp's ridley, the most endangered of the sea turtles, and the sunrise hatchling releases between June and August draw crowds to an otherwise deserted shore. The dunes and tidal flats behind the beach are also a major stopover on the central North American bird migration route.
9. Curonian Spit
The Curonian Spit carries 98 km of Baltic beach along its seaward face, running the full length of a curved sand bar that varies from just 400 m to 3.8 km wide and separates the shallow Curonian Lagoon from the open sea. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000, and it is the only entry on this list split between two countries: the northern portion lies in Klaipėda County in Lithuania, the southern in Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast.
Its dunes are the tallest in northern Europe, rising to around 50 m, and they are also the reason the spit needed saving. Centuries of deforestation left the sand free to move, and some fourteen villages were buried by advancing dunes between the 16th and 19th centuries; the landscape survives today only because generations of replanting and a near-continuous artificial foredune ridge hold it in place. The result is a strange, quiet mix of bare dune ridge, pine plantation and empty beach, with the lagoon side flat and warm and the seaward side properly Baltic.
10. Playa Novillero
Playa Novillero stretches almost 90 km along the Pacific coast of Nayarit, which makes it comfortably the longest beach in Mexico. It sits in the municipality of Tecuala in the north of the state, running up toward the Sinaloa border, and it is unusually shallow and flat — the water stays wadeable a long way out and the waves rarely build past a metre and a half.
The regional tourism board also places it among the five longest beaches in the world, which does not survive an actual count; it comes tenth here. That overstatement is a shame, because the beach needs no exaggerating. It is genuinely enormous and genuinely quiet, well off the Riviera Nayarit resort circuit further south, and the combination of gentle surf and very few people makes it one of the more relaxed entries on this list.
11. Ninety Mile Beach, New Zealand
Ninety Mile Beach is 88 km long, or about 55 miles, which makes it easily the most misleading name on this list. Known in Māori as Te Oneroa-a-Tōhē, the Long Beach of Tōhe, it runs up the west side of the Aupōuri Peninsula in Northland, from near Tauroa Point at its southern end to Tiriparepa/Scott Point in the far north of New Zealand.
The usual explanation for the name is a straightforward arithmetic error: travellers on horseback reckoned on covering roughly thirty miles a day, took three days to ride its length, and concluded it must be ninety miles — without allowing for how much slower horses move on soft sand. Like several beaches here it is legally a road, and tour buses still run along the tideline at low tide, though soft patches and incoming water claim rental cars with some regularity.
12. Ilha Comprida
Ilha Comprida closes the list at 74 km, which makes it Brazil's second-longest beach after Praia do Cassino and effectively one continuous strip of sand along the ocean face of a narrow barrier island in São Paulo state. The name translates as Long Island, and the island earns it: it averages only about 3 km wide along its entire length.
The whole island is a protected Environmental Protection Area, and the habitats packed into that narrow strip are the reason — dunes and restinga scrub on the seaward side, mangrove and remnant Atlantic Forest on the sheltered lagoon side. It sits within the estuarine complex around the old colonial towns of Cananéia and Iguape, part of a large protected estuarine and wetland system, and it stays notably quiet compared with the resort beaches further up the São Paulo coast.
FAQ: The World's Longest Beaches
What is the longest beach in the world?
Praia do Cassino in southern Brazil, at 254 km, has held the Guinness World Records title since 1994. It is not uncontested: Australia's Eighty Mile Beach is measured at 220 km and is described by some sources as a genuine rival, because how long any beach is depends on how finely its shoreline is traced.
How is the length of a beach actually measured?
Along the shore, following the sand rather than a straight line. The harder question is where a beach stops. This list counts one continuous sandy shore under a single name, so a rocky headland or a major tidal inlet ends it, while a small creek crossing the sand does not. Different rules produce very different rankings.
Why is Marina Beach in Chennai not on this list?
Because it is roughly 13 km long. Marina Beach is often described online as the longest beach in Asia, and occasionally as the second longest in the world, but neither claim holds up. That title in Asia belongs to Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, which runs about 120 km.
Which is the longest beach in Europe?
It depends on the measuring rule. The Landes coast in southwest France offers 106 km of near-unbroken sand and is widely promoted as Europe's largest beach. Portugal's Troia Peninsula, at 64.8 km, claims the title on a stricter definition of uninterrupted, since small watercourses cross the French sand at intervals.
Can you drive on the world's longest beaches?
On several, yes, and on a few it is the normal way to travel. 75 Mile Beach on K'gari is a gazetted highway that also serves as an airstrip, and New Zealand's Ninety Mile Beach is an official road. Soft sand and incoming tides make all of them genuinely hazardous for inexperienced drivers.
Planning more of your trip? Keep exploring more world record-breakers.