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 half a dozen town 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. Painters have been praising the light here for more than 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 at Portlligat (visits must be booked ahead, in groups of eight), 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 61-metre campanile, modelled on St Mark's in Venice, that you can climb for a small fee. 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, is one of 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.

About forty minutes on the coastal train from Lisbon's Cais do Sodré, Cascais was where Portuguese royalty went to swim, and it keeps a certain polish: sandy town beaches, a marina and ice-cream queues that move fast. The town's free bike scheme has closed, so rent a bike privately for the seafront. 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 town beaches, the last two anchovy-salting houses, Roque and Desclaux, keep a centuries-old trade alive, and the vineyards behind produce serious Banyuls and Collioure reds. Stay for the evening light on the bell tower; it's the whole postcard.

Under an hour east of Palermo by train, Cefalù packs a golden town beach, a Norman cathedral with glittering Byzantine 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 four sandy beaches and a harbour that empties photogenically at low tide. From Easter to October boats putter out from the harbour to Caldey Island, where Cistercian monks make 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 harbour at dusk is hard to leave.

Slovenia has just under 47 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. By evening most day-trippers have gone, and the town feels like 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 about twenty-five minutes away by dolmuş. Take a sea kayak alongside the sunken ruins of Kekova for the classic day out; swimming and anchoring over the ruins are banned. May, June and October dodge the fiercest of the heat.