Top 10 European Beaches

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Secluded coves, parties on the sand or bucket-and-spade golden expanses - find your perfect seaside spot in our pick of Europe's beaches, Barley water ... The beach at County Cork's Barley Cove. Photograph: The Irish Image Collection/Design Pics/Corbis

Cala d'en Serra, Ibiza
Ibiza's most famous beach is the long, white-sand crescent of Salinas, dotted with hip bars and beautiful people. However, it's the island's remote, peaceful coves that are far more prized by locals. Many of these require a long walk down a precipitous cliff path to reach nothing but rocks, dropping straight into the water. Cala d'en Serra is one that gives you the best of both worlds – a tranquil, secluded bay with its very own sandy beach. Stay at: Can Marti, an agroturismo on a working organic farm that produces its own electricity using solar panels. It's a 15-minute drive from the beach, in a remote valley. + 34 971 333 500; canmarti.com. Doubles from €130.

The Curonian Spit, Lithuania
A narrow finger of land poking into the Baltic Sea, the 98km-long Curonian Spit is one of Europe's more unlikely beach destinations. Reached by a 10-minute ferry crossing from the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda, this peninsula of shifting dunes and pine forests, where wolves and moose roam, is largely undiscovered by foreign tourists. Hire a bike from the fishing village of Nida and set off around the coast in search of your own perfect stretch of golden sand. In summer, the sea is millpond calm and warm enough to swim in, with the sun still high in the sky at 9pm. If you tire of the beach, you can shop for amber jewellery in Nida or join the locals for a long lunch of chilled beetroot soup, grilled eel or herring, and dumplings with sour cream (all for under £6).

Caños de Meca, Spain
The beach at Caños de Meca curves inland from the Cabo de Trafalgar, where Nelson defeated Napoleon just over 200 years ago. Things have chilled out a little since then. In fact, Canos de Meca has become a well-known hippy hangout on Spain's wind-whipped Costa de la Luz. The beachfront is wonderfully underdeveloped, save for the dreamlike La Jaima, a giant tented structure that cascades from the road down to the sand. Inside, you'll find a superb oriental restaurant and killer mojitos, and, when the mood grabs the locals, impromptu parties that spill out on to the beach.

Barleycove, County Cork, Ireland
Sun-worshipping beach bums may contest the inclusion of any beach from a country where it rains about 225 days of the year. However, this is no common-or-garden pebbly excuse for a beach, but a drop-dead-gorgeous sandy supermodel. And who needs sunbathing when you have dunes to explore, a child-friendly river to paddle, rolling waves to play in, and billowing expanses of pristine sand for walking. The beach, with its surrounding dunes and lagoons, is a designated 'special area of conservation' – look out for cormorants, mute swans and herring gulls, and a landscape dotted with wild pansy, lady's bedstraw and pale dog violets.

Cap Ferret, France
Not so much a beach as Sahara-on-Sea, Cap Ferret sits at the bottom of the The Lège-Cap Ferret peninsula, a long thin stretch of sand, pine trees and 10 small oyster villages, an hour's drive from Bordeaux. On the wilder Atlantic coast, the dunes and beach eventually evaporate in a shimmering heat haze and the sand is so fine and so deep it squeaks under foot. On the Bassin d'Arcachon side, the sea is calmer and faces the towering Dune du Pilat, the largest sand dune in Europe. Here parents and children wade through tidal pools and salt marshes hunting for crabs with Monsieur Hulot-style nets - a remembrance of summers past.

Scopello, Sicily
Scopello, on the west coast of Sicily, couldn't be more idyllic if it tried. A pretty stone village, complete with old men in black berets and a sweet gelateria. A 20-minute walk away is a tiny cove with sand the colour of vanilla ice-cream and minty clear water. It's overlooked by a disused tuna-processing plant (the area is famed for the Mattanza, the annual ritual slaughter of tuna off the Egadi islands) and towers of rock. There's nothing here so bring plenty of water and a beach mat, lie back and think of Brad Pitt (he filmed part of Ocean's Twelve on this very spot).

Three Cliffs Bay, Gower, Wales
Back in June, my buddies and I went for a weekend's camping on the Gower, the length of which (give or take a few squares of the OS map) we intended to traverse. Many of the beaches we negotiated - through intermittent drizzle, hot sun and whip-like winds - were lovely and memorable, but one exceeded the rest in its sheer beauty. Three Cliffs Bay isn't the beach where we were informed we were the first swimmers of the year without wetsuits; it isn't where we bought boogie boards and ice-creams; nor where we drank end-of-the-route celebratory pints in the cosy back room of a pub. There are none of these things there.

Sopot, Poland
The words powdery white sand and Poland may not appear to be a natural fit, but that's what you'll find in the Baltic spa town of Sopot: a pristine beach so vast that it never gets crowded, even in high summer. Once the playground of the Prussian aristocracy, the city has been Poland's most fashionable resort for almost a century. And since the end of the cold war, it has become its party capital, too, with a superb clubbing scene and a busy, boozy bar culture. Try Club Mandarynka in town or Copacabana Beach Club, which started life as a beach shack and is now an all-night disco complete with swimming pool. For the health conscious, it is backed by cycle paths, promenades and woodland trails, and is home to Europe's longest wooden pier.

Egremni, Lefkada, Greece
There is a reason why Greece has so many blue flag beaches – with over 15,000km of coastline, only Spain can offer similar variety on the theme of sand and sea. Egremni beach on the Ionian island of Lefkada is a perfect example. Climbing 350 or so steps down a dramatic cliff face deposits you on a long, pristine beach. The water is that perfect Mediterranean blue, almost as if it had been painted, and the pebbles get finer as you near the water's edge until they feel like sand. Being rather isolated, Egremni was a local's secret for a long time, though a nearby road now brings in the tourists. There are no watersports, and few distractions beyond the sea, but it is such a perfect spot, you won't need anything else. Lefkada itself might not be the most beautiful of Greek islands but it does have some fine little tavernas and two or three other spectacular beaches – most notably Porto Katsiki, Agios Nikitas and Pefkoulia.

Warnemünde, Germany
It's not the most perfect beach in Germany but Warnemünde offers a great holiday experience for anyone wishing to sample Deutschland's bracing Baltic coast - a white sandy beach, old-fashioned wicker chairs, known as Strandkörbe, and smoked fish. The beach, not far from the city of Rostock, also offers a bold dilemma – do you get your kit off? Like most beaches in Germany's former communist east, Warnemünde has a naturist and a 'textile' area. The resort has become something of a battleground between naked, bikini-hating Ossis (easterners) and their more prudish West German cousins. During my visit I asked one sun-browned kiosk-owner why he swam trunkless. He paused, then replied proudly: "In East Germany, we didn't have trunks." Even in summer the sea - known by Germans as the Ostsee- is bitingly cold. For me, a five-minute dip was enough.