Destinations
Every Destination We Cover
There are more than thirteen hundred beach bars in this directory and eleven regional guides to make sense of them. Each guide covers one place properly: which bars sit on which beach, which are worth the drive, and which stretch of coast to pick if you only have a week.
The test for getting listed has not changed since the first entry. Can you get a cold drink, and can you look at water while you drink it? That rules out a lot of restaurants with a sea view and lets in a lot of shacks with no menu. Beach Bum Certified means the Bum has stood there himself. Guest Verified means somebody we trust has physically confirmed it. Everything else is research, and we say so on the page.
The Caribbean
British Virgin Islands covers Jost Van Dyke, Virgin Gorda and Tortola, including the bar you swim to. US Virgin Islands runs across all three islands, St. John to St. Croix. St. Martin & Sint Maarten takes both halves of a divided island, French and Dutch. Jamaica runs from the West End cliffs at Negril to a bar standing on stilts off the south coast.
Florida and the Atlantic
Florida is the largest guide on the site by a wide margin, Panhandle to the Atlantic side. The Florida Keys handles the drive from Key Largo down to Key West on its own. North of that, Chesapeake Bay covers the crab docks and workboat towns of Maryland and Virginia, and The Outer Banks runs the North Carolina barrier islands.
The Pacific and Beyond
Hawaii spans the islands, from Waikiki to the quieter end of the Big Island. Oregon is the cold-water outlier: three hundred and sixty miles of coastline that is public by law, where the beach bar is usually a brewpub with the weather happening outside the window. Costa Rica covers both of its coasts, Pacific and Caribbean, which are nothing alike.
More Guides on the Way
Eleven guides cover a fraction of the directory. Roughly two thirds of the bars listed here still have no regional guide, which is the work for the coming months.
Next in line are the places with real coverage and nowhere to put it: the Alabama Gulf shore, the Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire chain, Anguilla, the Texas coast, and sub-guides for the parts of Florida and the Chesapeake the current pages cannot reach. If there is somewhere you want covered, say so and it moves up the list.
Not Sure Where to Start?
If you would rather not pick a region, browse every bar in the directory and filter it down yourself, or open the beach bar map and see what is near you.
Found a bar that belongs here? Tell us about it. Own or run one? Get it listed.