How do you Know if a Nude Beach is Still Nude

If you’re following our Destination Clothes Free YouTube channel, or our Nick & Lins short videos, you know that we have been visiting A LOT of nude beaches in recent years. We’ve been to some of the world’s most famous ones, we’ve found true hidden gems, there were the popular urban nude beaches and those for which we had to hike for over an hour to get to.

And then… There were also the nude beaches that appeared to be no nude beaches at all. At least not when we were there. One would think that after years of being “professional” nude beach visitors, we would be better at filtering out the right ones. Let us explain.

We intentionally don’t do our research too well. Sounds weird, right? Well, here’s the thing, we are strong believers in first impressions. When we are shooting videos, we want to capture the real experience. Our real amazement or our real disappointment. And this only works when we’re not completely prepared.

It hasn’t always been like this. When we first started making videos, we wanted to know everything there was to know about a place before we set our first foot through the door, or on the sand, for that matter. We had seen all the pictures, read all the reviews, and knew exactly what was waiting for us. It was practical, but it didn’t cause much emotion. Most of our wonder and awe had already happened weeks before when we had looked at the pictures.

So what we do know is just scan the internet for mentions of potential nude beaches. Places listed in directories, mentions in blog posts, reviews, or on Tripadvisor. Everything we find ends up on the list, we look up the GPS coordinates, and we head over there. The trouble is that the internet definitely isn’t always right.

Some websites are regularly updated and contain all the hot off the presses information. Most websites listing nude beaches do not belong to this group. This is especially a problem with directories. At some point, they may have been pretty accurate, but it’s nearly impossible to keep all the information for every single nude beach in the world up to date.

Note that we wrote “may have been pretty accurate”. Few directories are based on new research, but instead just copy even older information that was already on other websites. We have actually ended up at beaches that were listed as nude beaches on plenty of websites, only to find nothing but bathing suits. When we asked about it in town, they told us that this hasn’t been a nude beach for at least a decade and a half. But just because new websites were copying old information, the wrong message just kept spreading.

Okay, so the internet is often wrong, then what is a good way to figure out if you’re heading towards a nude beach or whether you’ll just spend half a day searching for something that isn’t there?

This is the point where we are supposed to praise our own platforms. Watch our YouTube videos and read our blogs, because we have actually been to every single nude beach we talk about! But we’re not going to do that, because we are well aware that at one point or another, our information will get outdated as well. And even more, that our experience was just a snapshot. It’s not because a beach was a nude-friendly beach today that it will be the same in two or three months. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

One of the best solutions for making sure that you’ll end up at an actual nude beach is to look for official ones. These are often listed on federation websites, or if you’re looking at the pictures, you’ll usually find one showing some government sign.

Now, official nude beaches do disappear as well from time to time, but this rarely happens overnight and not without some fuss. If an official nude beach is lost, you’ll often find a news article about it. Or if it happened in recent years, Planet Nude probably wrote about it as well.

We talk about nude beaches we visited, but we’re definitely not the only ones. Many people share their experience, albeit not always on a blog or in a video, but in small comments. If you read the reviews on Google Maps or Tripadvisor, you’ll often get a decent indication. These don’t always need to come from naturists, by the way. A “we were walking along this beach and suddenly saw a lot of naked people” is a pretty good clue too.

When you’re reading reviews, the most important thing is to look at the date. A commentary from 2008 doesn’t say anything about the beach today.

We previously mentioned that directory websites often contain old or incomplete information, well, there is an exception. Those who are driven by reviews from their community are often the most up-to-date websites around. A good example is Blootkompas. As Belgians, we often joke that the Dutch like to have an opinion about everything. This website kind of proves that point, but we have to admit that it’s incredibly helpful.

When you’re looking at the date of the review, you definitely want to check how old it is, but equally important is to look at the time of the year. Especially for unofficial nude beaches. What happened a lot when we were in Spain or Italy is that we would visit this supposed-to-be nude beach in summer and found nothing but bathing suits. As soon as we posted the video, we started receiving messages that it’s only nude-friendly in spring or autumn.

This is unfortunately not uncommon. Many nude beaches suffer from bathing suit invasions during the high season. At official nude beaches this may feel uncomfortable, but they will still be nude beaches. The sign says so. Unofficial nude beaches, on the other hand, just become textile beaches.

So whenever someone wrote “this is a great nude beach” or “this is not a nude beach at all”, check what time of the year the review was written. This counts for our content as well, by the way. In our Destination Clothes Free videos, we always try to mention when it was filmed, just to give you an indication of what the status was during that specific time of the year.

Other than believing in first impressions, we also really like the idea that there’s only one way to find out. This is why we haven’t given up on hiking for kilometres to what may or may not be a nude beach. The satisfaction is stronger when we can actually get naked, and if not, we usually saw a nice place we otherwise hadn’t seen and maybe came back with a good story to tell.

The only waterproof answer to make sure if a beach is nude-friendly or not is to just head over there and see for yourself. But that’s easy for us to say, when it’s a fail, we just move on to the next beach. If this is your precious week of vacation or the only day of the month with perfect weather, you want to be certain. In that case, we’re sure that the above tips will definitely help.