Ten lovely beach towns for lazy harbourside evenings

A great beach town gives you two holidays for the price of one: sand and swimming by day, then an evening life of harbour walls, grilled fish and lights on the water. The ten below all pass the crucial test — you'd happily visit even if it rained. Book somewhere central enough to walk home from dinner, and don't over-plan; the whole point of these places is what happens between the things you meant to do.

An old pilchard port turned art colony, St Ives crams four beaches, a Tate gallery and a maze of whitewashed lanes onto one bright peninsula. Porthmeor has the surf and the sunsets; Porthminster the calm water and the palm trees. The light really is different here — painters have been saying so for a century. Come in June or September, when the alleys breathe again.

Reached over a hair-raising mountain road on the Cap de Creus peninsula, Cadaqués stayed a fishing village while the rest of the Costa Brava grew hotels. Whitewashed houses tumble to a bay full of little boats, Dalí's house-museum sits in the next cove, and evenings mean anchovies, cold rosé and the slow promenade. The beaches are pebbly; the atmosphere more than compensates.

Rovinj's old town rises straight from the Adriatic, a Venetian tangle of ochre and rose topped by a campanile you can climb. Swim off the rocks below the houses like the locals do, or cycle to the pine-shaded coves of the Golden Cape forest park just south. Istria is Croatia's food region, so dinner — truffles, scampi, malvazija wine — deserves as much attention as the sea.

Naousa's tiny harbour, guarded by a half-sunk Venetian fort, might be the prettiest in the Cyclades — octopus drying in the sun, tables at the water's edge, bougainvillaea against whitewash. Superb sandy beaches fan out on either side: Kolymbithres with its sculpted granite, Monastiri for calm water. It gets lively in August; June keeps the charm and halves the queues.

Forty minutes on a coastal train from Lisbon, Cascais was where Portuguese royalty went to swim, and it keeps a certain polish: sandy town beaches, a marina, a free bike scheme and ice-cream queues that move fast. Cycle the seafront path to the crashing Boca do Inferno, or bus out to Guincho for wild Atlantic surf. An easy, elegant first taste of Portugal's coast.

Where the Pyrenees dip their last foothills into the Mediterranean, Collioure glows — Matisse and Derain invented Fauvism trying to paint its pink and orange houses. A royal castle splits the two town beaches, anchovy boats still land their catch, and the vineyards behind produce serious Banyuls and Collioure reds. Stay for the evening light on the bell tower; it's the whole postcard.

An hour east of Palermo, Cefalù packs a golden town beach, a Norman cathedral with world-class mosaics and a labyrinth of medieval streets under a great slab of rock you can climb for the view. Swim in the morning, granita at noon, cathedral in the shade of the afternoon, then pasta con le sarde as the boats come in. Sicily in convenient miniature.

Tenby's pastel Georgian terraces stand on cliffs above three enormous sandy beaches and a harbour that empties photogenically at low tide. Boats putter out to Caldey Island, where monks sell chocolate and perfume; the coast path serves up stiff walks in both directions. It's cheerful, old-fashioned seaside done with real looks — and the sunsets over the harbour are ludicrous.

Slovenia has just 46 kilometres of coastline and spends nearly all of its charm on Piran: a Venetian-Gothic wedge of terracotta roofs and marble squares on a narrow peninsula, with swimming ladders dropping straight off the promenade rocks. Climb the campanile — a miniature of St Mark's in Venice — then settle in for sea bass and a glass of local malvazija as the lights come on around Tartini Square. Day-trippers vanish by seven; the town becomes yours.

A whitewashed former Greek fishing town on Turkey's Lycian coast, Kaş curls around a small harbour where wooden gulets moor beneath bougainvillaea and dinner tables edge the water. Swimming is off ladders and little lidos around the peninsula, and the ludicrously turquoise Kaputaş beach is twenty minutes away by dolmuş. Take a sea kayak over the sunken ruins of Kekova for the classic day out. May, June and October dodge the fiercest of the heat.