Ten hidden coves worth the scramble

The best swims rarely have a car park attached. These ten coves ask something of you first — a walk down a gorge, a scramble over a headland, a boat you have to book — and pay you back with water most beaches can only dream about. None requires ropes or real nerve, just decent shoes and a bit of resolve. Pack water, go early, and carry everything out again. The emptiness is the luxury.

The prettiest of the fjord-like calanques between Marseille and Cassis: sheer white limestone walls closing around a wedge of pebbles and water of a blue that seems lit from below. It's a ninety-minute walk from Cassis through pine forest, or a kayak trip along the coast. Summer access is sometimes restricted on fire-risk days, so check before setting out — June and September are kinder anyway.

Little sister to the famous Macarella, and reached by a ten-minute clifftop path that filters out anyone carrying too much kit. What's left is a pocket of white sand between pine-topped cliffs and water like a swimming pool. Come by foot along the Camí de Cavalls or by the summer boat from Ciutadella; either way, arrive before ten or after four in high season.

The famous one: a rusting smugglers' shipwreck beached on blinding white shingle, ringed by cliffs the colour of bone. There's no path — access is by boat trip from Porto Vromi or Zakynthos Town — and swimming stops when the sea is up. Skip midday, when the flotilla arrives; the first morning boat gets you the cove close to empty. The clifftop viewing platform is a destination in itself.

On the Lizard peninsula, Kynance is the Cornwall of paintings: serpentine rock stacks, white sand revealed at low tide and sea that flashes genuinely turquoise on a sunny day. The walk down from the National Trust car park takes ten steep minutes. Time your visit for a falling tide — the beach all but disappears at high water — and reward yourself at the tucked-away café.

On the Golfo di Orosei, where Sardinia's mountains fall straight into the sea, Mariolu is a curve of white marble pebbles under apricot cliffs, with visibility underwater that borders on the absurd. Most visitors come by boat from Cala Gonone or Santa Maria Navarrese; the hardy hike in from the plateau above. Numbers are capped in summer — book the boat a day or two ahead.

A beach with no sea in sight: Gulpiyuri sits in a sinkhole a hundred metres inland, filled through underground tunnels that funnel the Cantabrian swell into a meadow. It's tiny — barely forty metres — and only really swimmable around high tide, but there's nowhere else quite like it. Walk in across the fields from Naves and combine it with the surf town of Llanes for lunch.

Just north of Cabo da Roca, mainland Europe's westernmost point, a rough path drops through scrub to a wild Atlantic beach guarded by two colossal sea stacks. The descent is steep and the ocean is for paddling rather than swimming, but as a place to feel small in the best way, Ursa has few rivals. Go late afternoon, when the stacks catch the sinking sun.

A gleaming arch of white rock connects two perfect scoops of sand on the Coromandel Peninsula, with pōhutukawa trees flowering crimson above in December. The walk in takes about forty-five minutes from Hahei, or you can kayak round the marine reserve's coastline, which is the better day out. New Zealand summer — December to March — brings water warm enough to linger in.

From the saddle lookout in Freycinet National Park, Wineglass Bay is a flawless white crescent bitten out of pink granite mountains. Carry on down the far side and you'll likely share the sand with wallabies and not much else. The water is bracing even in an Australian summer, but the walk-swim-walk combination is one of the great half-days in the southern hemisphere.

Despite the grim name — currents once carried shipwrecked sailors here — this is one of Spain's most beautiful beaches: a kilometre of pale pebbles and glass-clear water below the volcanic hills of Cabo de Gata. The twenty-minute path down from the viewpoint is rough and shadeless, and there are no facilities at all. Bring everything, take everything away, swim endlessly.