To be honest, we have been lucky. We visited 6 nude beaches during the last 3 days, and we haven’t seen any abnormal behaviour. Well, there was this one guy popping up and down from the dunes, gazing in the direction of the naked people, but when you frequently visit nude beaches, you’ll probably agree that just one voyeur can be considered quite a success.
Maybe it’s just us, after visiting hundreds of nude beaches and having seen many different behaviours, we’ve grown a thick skin. As long as its not too much in our faces, we can easily let it pass. But that’s now. Years ago, when we were just dipping our toes in the whole nude beach experience, this one guy may have been the reason for us to go away. Or, to a further extent, to never go to nude beaches again.
Beaches are free. Period.
We were recording a video about the nude beaches in and around the Camargue, a very specific area on the French Mediterranean coast. The gawker must have appeared at the second or third beach on our list, we can’t remember, even though it was just a few days ago. It really didn’t matter. But what we will probably remember for a while is the last beach on our list.
Just as we arrived at what Google Maps said was a parking lot, we got to a barrier with three Donald Ducking guys (if you’re not familiar with the naturist slang, “Donald Ducking” means being dressed on top but wearing nothing at the bottom). They told us that we were entering a private property, which was owned by a naturist club, and that the entrance fee was 10€ per person.
Call us cheap, but we’re not the kind of people who like to pay to visit a beach. Especially not in Europe, where, to our understanding, the whole coastline is free for all to visit. If this had just been a fun trip, a day out to the nude beach, we probably would have turned around and gone somewhere else. Somewhere free. Potentially, somewhere with eyes peeking above the grass in the dunes.
It’s the price you pay
As this was the last beach on our list and apparently quite a popular one, we reluctantly coughed up the 20 euros so at least we would get some shots to complete our video. Well… that didn’t really happen… We dare to say that of all the beaches we had been to during the last days, this one was the least inviting. It wasn’t beautiful, it wasn’t even sandy. We may have found the only part of rocky coast at all of the French Mediterranean Coast. But that was not what stopped us from filming. Also, it was packed. Packed as in “filming here would get you straight to the guillotine”.
Ten euros per person was just the “tourist price”. Members of the club could enter for free and membership was just 50 euros per year. Meaning that if you’re planning to visit the place more than 5 times per year, you actually get a good deal.
The price didn’t just allow you to enter the beach either, the club had also set up showers and toilets (which are rare at nude beaches in France) as a well as a bar (which is even rarer) and a number of petanque courts (which are the least rare thing in France. Really, in this part of the country, you can’t walk to the end of any street without finding a petanque court. But that’s not the point). Maybe the most important element the club provided was a comfortable nude zone.
What’s a Comfortable Nude Zone?
In one of our previous blog posts we talked about a “social nude ratio” (in the sense of what percentage of clothed people you can stand until being nude becomes awkward). Some of you easily abbreviated this and made the “SNR” a thing. Well, here we have another thing for you: The CNZ. Comfortable Nude Zone. It has some similarities with a DMZ in military terms, the CNZ is a place where you can feel comfortably naked.
Most clothes-free resorts are CNZs, but for beaches, this is rather rare. Mostly because at nude beaches, even the official ones, there’s nobody to check whether everyone comes in with the right reasons. We’re not just talking about the gawkers in the dunes, countries like Spain or Greece, that suffer from mass tourism, also have issues with bathing suits flooding the nude beaches just because these are the only quiet parts of the coastline left.
And who’s there to stop them? The other visitors of the beach didn’t really come there to get into a discussion, and the authorities usually can’t be bothered either (we haven’t heard of any nude beach where the police controls the dress code). But when there’s a club connected to the beach, they will stand up.
From Spain to San Diego and back over Rio de Janeiro
One of the places where mass tourism really influences the SNR (Social Nude Ratio, do you remember?) is Raco de Conill, a small nude beach on the outskirts of the popular tourist city Benidorm in Spain. When Benidorm starts getting packed in high season, flocks of bathing suits head towards the more remote coves like Raco de Conill. Even though there’s a big sign saying that this is a beach with “naturist tradition”, the bathing suits couldn’t care less.
If you go on a weekday in June, you’re likely to be the only naked person there. If you even dare to get naked at all. But on weekends, the local naturist group makes sure that there are at least some naked people by the time you arrive.
Years ago, we went to Black’s Beach in Southern California. It’s one of the most famous nude beaches in the USA, and nude really is the norm. But as tourists who didn’t know anyone, it probably would have been quite lonely. But it wasn’t, because a local naturist group had set up camp and was inviting people to hang out with them.
Near Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, we wanted to visit the Praia do Abrico nude beach. We had been told to only go during weekends, when the local naturist association was present. We did not listen. We went on a Thursday, and it was one of the weirdest experiences ever. Only guys, nobody was lying down and enjoying the sun, they were all just standing up, naked, looking at each other from a distance. We left after less than five minutes. When we returned two days later (Saturday), it couldn’t have been much different. There were couples, single women, families, it seemed like a private beach of a French naturist resort.
Another great experience we had with naturist beach groups was at Playa de Cantarrijan, back in Spain. It’s a long, beautiful beach, but what made the experience really special is that we were there with a group of like-minded people. We were all there for the same thing: to enjoy this beautiful nature in our most natural state.
Why you need to support nude beach groups
We almost turned away when we heard that we needed to pay 10 euros each to visit that last beach on our list. But we didn’t, because we wanted it to be in the video (eventually, we had to stay overnight to get a chance to film without people around). But only later, we realised that we were doing the right thing. That club wasn’t there to take advantage of a nude zone, they were there to protect it.
Just like in Spain, the USA, or Brazil, there were people dedicated to creating Comfortable Nude Zones in public places. And they deserve our support. Maybe even more than companies running naturist resorts. If every nude beach had a group of people who took an interest in keeping the beach nude-friendly and maintaining a certain SNR, our nude beach experiences would probably be a lot better.
We won’t think twice before coughing up the next 20 euros to support a group that takes care of a nude beach. And after reading all this, we hope you won’t either.
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It’s interesting.
Initially I had a strong association with parking scammers in the past, when a random guy asked for “only 1E” to have an eye on your car. It was a service in those days, no doubt. Your car was more safe if you paid. (:sarcasm)
You say the club builds toilets and bars on the beach. It’s great, and mostly removes the “scam factor”. Still, what’s their legal basis (EU) to claim some part of the coastline “private” and to forbid entry to strangers ?
Public coastline is a wonderful European achivement and personally I am against claiming any part of the public area private, no matter what noble cause lies underneath.
Imagine that this mechanism (aka “legal loophole”) becomes omnipresent, with most landlords focused on textile beachgoers…