Random Beach Name Generator

How this random beach generator works

Press Generate and you get a beach and where it is. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

Bondi in Sydney. Copacabana in Rio. Anse Source d'Argent in the Seychelles. Cala Macarelleta in Menorca.

And Waikiki in Hawaii, where most of the sand was put there by people.

Waikiki is a construction project

Waikiki is one of the most photographed stretches of sand on Earth, and coastal engineers describe it flatly as a built beach. Under it is rock and coral. The sand is a century of maintenance.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, sand was carried to Waikiki from Manhattan Beach, California. A construction firm hauled it out of the dunes, loaded it onto railway cars to the harbour, and shipped it across the Pacific.

Importing from the mainland stopped in the 1970s. Before and after that, sand came from Waimea Bay, from a sandbar off Kahuku, and from Pāpōhaku Beach on Moloka'i.

Then the walls went up. Before 1950 Waikiki was one continuous beach. By 1950 more than eighty structures stood along that shoreline: seawalls and groins and piers and storm drains, each one interrupting the beach in a way nobody had quite intended.

And here is the part that is almost too neat. The modern projects have stopped importing anything. They pump sand back up from the seabed a few hundred metres offshore, which is precisely where the beach has been quietly going.

This is not a scandal. It is what a beach is.

A beach is not a place. It is a process.

Here is the thing that took geologists a long time to say plainly, and that almost nobody is taught.

The sand on a beach is not sitting there. It is travelling. Waves almost never arrive exactly square to the shore. They come in at an angle, run up the sand at that angle, and then drain straight back down under gravity. Every wave moves each grain a little way along the coast.

The name for it is longshore drift, and it means a beach is a slow river of sand flowing sideways. Sand arrives at one end. Sand leaves at the other. What you call "the beach" is the amount in transit at the moment you looked.

It also changes shape by season. Gentle summer waves push sand up into a wide berm. Violent winter storms drag it offshore into a submerged bar, and the beach appears to vanish. It has not gone anywhere. It is waiting a hundred metres out.

Build a groin or a seawall and you interrupt the river. Sand piles up on one side and starves on the other, which is exactly what happened at Waikiki.

You cannot own a beach. You can only rent one from the sea, and the rent is paid in sand.

Where sand actually comes from

Two answers, and they produce two completely different beaches.

Continental sand is a mountain that lost. Rivers grind rock into fragments and carry them to the sea. Feldspar rots into clay. Softer minerals shatter and dissolve. Quartz does neither, because it is hard and chemically stubborn, so quartz is what survives the journey. A gold beach is a mountain, downstream, finally at rest.

Tropical sand is a fish's leftovers. On coral coasts there are no rivers bringing quartz. The sand is broken coral and shell, ground up by waves and, remarkably, by parrotfish, which bite chunks off the reef to eat the algae and pass the rest as sand.

Which is why the colour tells you the geology before you look at a map. White means reef. Gold means river. Black means recent lava. Green, on the very rare beaches that are green, means a mineral called olivine, weathered out of volcanic rock.

Pick up a handful and you are holding the answer to what the rock upstream is made of.

Anse, Cala, Bahía

A great many of the world's most beautiful beaches do not have the word "beach" anywhere in their names, and the words they use instead cluster by language.

Anse appears again and again in the Seychelles. Anse Lazio, Anse Georgette, Anse Volbert, Anse Source d'Argent. It is French for a cove, and the Seychelles were French before they were British.

Cala runs through Spain and Italy. Cala Salada in Ibiza, Cala Macarelleta in Menorca, Cala Mariolu in Sardinia. Same idea, a small sheltered inlet, from a root shared across the western Mediterranean.

Bahía turns up wherever Spanish charted the coast. And some names are not beaches at all but whole places that happen to have them, like Bora Bora, which is an island.

A list of the world's beaches is therefore also a small map of which empire wrote the signs.

Ways people actually use this

• Travel shortlists. You have heard of maybe fifteen of them.
• Quizzes. Show the beach, ask for the country. Anse Lazio defeats most people.
• Geography teaching. Generate five and ask what colour each one is and why. The answer is always about the rock upstream.
• Deciding where to go next February, which is the honest reason most people are here.
• Naming things. Cala, Anse and Bahía all make excellent product names, and none of them is taken.

Getting more out of the filters

• Every entry is written "Name, Place", so Contains works as a country filter. Try Seychelles, Greece, Thailand, Australia.
• Type Anse for the Seychellois coves and Cala for the Mediterranean ones. Two words, two colonial histories.
• Type Beach and look at what does not come back. Those are the most interesting names of the lot.
• Ends with ignores the country and reads the last letter of the beach's own name, so h returns the ones that end in "Beach".

Questions people ask

Where does beach sand come from?

Mostly from eroded rock carried down by rivers, of which the quartz survives because it is hard and chemically stable. On tropical coasts it comes instead from broken coral and shell, some of it processed by parrotfish.

Why are some beaches white and some gold?

White sand is usually crushed coral and shell. Gold sand is usually quartz from a continent's rivers. Black sand is volcanic. The colour is a direct readout of what the rock nearby is made of.

Do beaches move?

Constantly. Waves striking the shore at an angle carry sand sideways along the coast, a process called longshore drift. Beaches also swell in summer and shrink in winter, because storm waves pull sand into an offshore bar.

Is Waikiki Beach artificial?

Largely. It is a built beach over rock and coral. Sand has been added for a century, imported from Manhattan Beach in California during the 1920s and 1930s and later drawn from other Hawaiian sources and from the seabed offshore.

Why do seawalls destroy beaches?

Because sand is passing through, not sitting still. A wall or a groin catches the sand arriving from one direction and starves everything downstream of it. You get a wide beach on one side and bare rock on the other.

References

1. Waikīkī
2. Seeking the origins of Waikiki sand
3. Sands of time, Images of Old Hawaii