The Year of the European Nude Beaches

Every year during the last days of December, that same old question pops up again: “Where did we celebrate New Year’s Eve last time?”. It sounds like such an insignificant thing, but in a way, it very well defines what we do. Our life as digital nomads. Always somewhere, rarely for long.

In the past, we’ve found ourselves celebrating the start of a new year way before everyone else at a naturist campground in Australia, or later than most people in a hostel in Uruguay. Or not at all, if the jetlag or day drinking sent us to bed way before midnight.

If you’re curious, last time we celebrated New Year’s Eve in Costa Natura resort in the south of Spain. A great start for a very European year.

Although we loved staying at Costa Natura, for us, the new year really started when we drove Scartlet, our van, onto the ferry direction Canary Islands. There were just so many new elements to this trip. Spending 30+ hours on a boat, taking Scarlet overseas, camping for months in an area that doesn’t have any campgrounds, and visiting islands we had been dreaming of for a long while. The Canaries delivered in nude options and beautiful places to wake up to, but probably most of all, this trip confirmed that van life is really our kind of thing.

Enjoying camping and van life comes in pretty handy if you want to be a European naturist. Most of the resorts are campgrounds and thanks to plenty of wild camping opportunities, we could often stick pretty close to the nude beaches we wanted to visit. We even discovered a “new” kind of camping: Campspace. It’s basically like Airbnb, but instead of renting out a room, people rent out space on their property for you to camp. There are a few websites like this, but what makes Campspace special is that they have a “naturism allowed” filter. We tested it out, and we can tell you that it worked.

The Campspace experiment happened while we were travelling north along the Spanish Mediterranean coast, which also marked the beginning of a very long road trip through Europe that would take us through France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Croatia. We visited a few resorts along the way, like Bélézy, La Sablière, Sérignan Plage Nature, Baldarin, Koversada Uncovered, and the Corsican BIG 3. But most of all, this trip was about beaches. All in all, we probably visited well over 200 nude beaches in 2025, and still, we feel that we’ve barely scratched the surface of the possibilities.

Late October in Sardinia, when the days started to drastically shorten, the evenings got more than agreeably chilly, and stormy weather was messing up our video plans, we realised that European van life was over for this year. We drove to Belgium to put Scarlet under a roof and headed to a place where spring was ready to turn into summer: Australia. If you’re not following us on Instagram, this may come as a surprise because we haven’t published anything yet about our Australian adventure on this blog or on YouTube. But it’s coming soon, we promise, here’s already a cool picture:

You may have noticed a few changes in our publications during the last year. On this blog, we stuck to the one post per week schedule, but posted a lot more naturist-travel content and less content about general naturist topics (like first timer tips, visions, musings, etc). One big reason for this is that our video audience often asks for specific things that may not have appeared in the video or were difficult to understand, like names of places. So we started making blogs with more detailed information linked to a certain Destination Clothes Free video.

Another reason why we’re leaning more towards travel information is that sometimes we feel like we’ve already covered most other topics. Often more than once. This is the 681st blog post that will appear on Naked Wanderings. If you still have a beginner question, we’re pretty sure we already answered it on one point or another over the years.

BUT…these posts were also why we started our blog in the first place, to share our ideas and visions about naturism and clothes-free travelling, and sometimes it feels like our content is becoming too much information and not enough personality. So this is definitely a balance we’ll keep trying to perfect in the coming year(s).

On YouTube, not much has changed in the structure. We have our Nick and Lins channel with the vlogs and our Destination Clothes Free channel with the resort tours and nude beach guides. In recent months, our schedule for Destination Clothes Free has grown from two videos per month to a video per week. This is partially because we shot much more footage in 2025 than we needed for just two videos per month, and also because after years of travelling and filming, we have a huge backlog that we can use for new videos.

One of our goals for 2025 was to grow Destination Clothes Free into the brand it deserves to be. We think we succeeded pretty well. What started as a little spin-off from our Nick and Lins channel, because we needed a place to put our resort tours, turned into a YouTube channel that gets hundreds of thousands of views per month and a dedicated social media community of people who love travelling without clothes.

But an unfortunate tradition we also managed to keep alive in 2025 was that once again, we had to come to the realisation that we can’t do everything all the time. With the success of Destination Clothes Free, our Nick and Lins channel became somewhat neglected and turned into a sort of behind-the-scenes channel. We know that some of you enjoyed this very much, but generally speaking, this was not a very successful move. So this too, is something we’ll need to look into very well for the new year.

Which brings us to the things we learned in 2025. Number one is definitely that we have to pick our battles instead of trying to do everything. Although we’d prefer it to be different, we were just dealt the same number of hours in a day as everyone else.

Lesson number two is that van life is more expensive than we thought and comes with more responsibility. Being used to travelling by planes and overnight buses, distances were never something we considered much. Which is how we ended up crossing through France four times last year. Now, if you know anything about Diesel prices and toll roads in France, you know that this has cost us a small fortune. Scarlet also gave up on us a few times, a cost in time and money that we hadn’t anticipated.

We also learned that we might be getting old. Well… older. Our inner Peter Pans are still very alive, but last year we noticed a shift in our preferred travel season. In the past, we always LOVED the summer months. That’s when the resorts are full, there are lots of young people and families, there’s plenty of entertainment and always something going on.

However, while we were visiting Bélézy and La Sablière in early June, we really appreciated the silence and relaxed vibe. We always figured that the shoulder months were for the oldies, who can’t stand the noise and want to get to bed early. Apparently, we’ve become one of them. But the fact that this time of the year makes it a lot easier for us to film might also have something to do with it.

And then there were some very local things we learned. How spectacular the scenery of La Gomera island is, and that of Sardinia. How amazing the Dutch nude beaches really are. How busy Croatia gets in summer. How many nude beaches Italy has. And how, even though we’ve been to Corsica multiple times, the island keeps amazing us.

What’s not really a lesson but rather something that was reconfirmed in 2025, is that this is not just the life we’ve chosen, it’s also our dream life. Of course, it’s not because we enjoy it that by default you will as well, and if we’re just making content that nobody reads or watches, that would be pretty sad. So let’s have a look at your favourites of 2025.

Most read blog posts:
1. 10 Nude Beaches You Need to Visit in 2025
2. How to Handle Awkward Situations when You’re Naked
3. No more bathing suits on German nude beaches
4. What if Your Partner is not a Nudist?
5. Naked in Public Places: How comfortable is it?

Most watched Nick & Lins videos:
1. We Travelled 48 HOURS for this NUDE BEACH (Maspalomas, Gran Canaria)
2. 7 Nude Beaches in 3 Days
3. We went to (almost) every nude beach in Camargue
4. Canary Islands in the Nude: Gran Canaria
5. Every visitor to Vera Playa should know this

Most watched Destination Clothes Free videos:
1. Croatia’s Best Nude Island: Krk or Rab?
2. A Guide to the Nude Beaches of Tenerife, Spain
3. A Guide to the Nude Beaches around Alicante, Spain
4. A Guide to the Nude Beaches of Cabo de Gata (Spain)
5. 5 Clothes Free Resorts in Thailand YOU CANNOT MISS

You definitely seem to like watching videos about Spain and reading about uncomfortable situations, but these statistics don’t really mean much. What’s a lot more interesting for us is hearing first hand what you’re looking for.

So please leave in the comments which destinations you’d like us to cover in the future, which information you’re missing, and which topics you’d like to hear our opinions about. We’re also interested in hearing whether you consider yourself more a reader or a viewer, and in the case of a viewer, whether you prefer Destination Clothes Free or our Nick and Lins vlogs.

Well, what’s coming up will all depend on what you say in the comments… Just kidding, we are in the middle of making a lot of plans for 2026, and there are a few things we can already tell you. Kinda.

The first months of the year will be slightly different from previous years. We’re still working some things out and can’t tell you much about it yet, but expect some news soon-ish.

Then there will be another huge European van life trip, roughly from April to at least the end of September. The direction we’re going isn’t fixed yet, but we have a few ideas. Here, your input is very valuable, both to give us an idea of which places you’d like to know more about, but also some inside tips about things we might not find on our own.

Then for the end of the year, we’re still not certain what our next “winter” destination should be. We are eyeing the USA again, partially because we’d really like to see the look on the person’s face who has to go through our social media posts of the last 5 years, but also because there’s still so much for us to discover.

When re-reading the last few paragraphs, it dawns that we don’t really have a clue yet what we’ll be doing in 2026. That too very well defines what we do. Our life as digital nomads. Always somewhere, rarely for long.

The reason why we can afford to live our dream life is all thanks to you. Thank you for being here, for reading our blogs, for watching our videos, and for joining our Patreon community. THANK YOU SO MUCH!

We hope that you had an amazing end of 2025 and an even better start of 2026. And that you have lots of clothes-free travel plans, because we have lots of inspiration coming up!