The most world-famous beaches in Hawaii

Beaches are indefinite places, neither land nor sea, but thin, shifting strips between worlds. We leave footprints quickly erased by wind and tide, build castles that disappear by morning, daydream impossibly sunny realities, and bring sorrows to melt away as surely as our castles.

Any beach can invite us to swim, perhaps to sleep in the shade of a drowsy palm. What sets Hawaii’s beaches apart is their location in the middle of the Pacific, where they are cooled by the trade winds. The air, scoured by thousands of miles of open ocean, is pure and soft upon the skin. You ease into clear water that is neither too warm nor too cold, ranging from 73 degrees in winter to 80 degrees in summer. Without any continental shelf, the seafloor drops off abruptly into blue infinity. Reefs protecting the shore are home to myriad wondrous sea creatures. The sands kissed by these numinous seas come in shades of white, gold, ebony, salt-and-pepper, garnet, and even green.