The 14 Best Coastal Escapes in Africa

Pink-granite boulders sculpted by centuries of erosion line this powder-white beach on La Digue, shaded by takamaka trees and broken into a series of small coves and rock pools.

Some of the boulders are the size of houses.

The water is calm and shallow enough to wade a long way out, which makes it better for drifting about than for swimming properly.

Getting in means paying to cross a private plantation.

Giant pink-granite boulders line the pale sand and shallow turquoise water of Anse Source d'Argent, the best known of a string of coves along La Digue's coast.

The island moves at bicycle pace - there are barely any cars, and the whole place can be crossed in an hour on two wheels.

Development stays low-rise, and the interior is dense palm and takamaka forest.

Table Mountain's flat-topped silhouette looms directly over the city bowl, often capped by a rolling cloud locals call the tablecloth.

A cable car reaches the summit in minutes, but the classic view is looking back at the mountain from Bloubergstrand or Signal Hill, with the city spread out beneath it.

Penguins waddle across a public beach at Boulders just outside the city.

Powder-white beaches and turquoise Indian Ocean water ring this Swahili Coast island, while Stone Town's maze of coral-stone alleys and carved wooden doors holds centuries of trading-post history.

Sandbanks appear and vanish with the tide, and traditional dhows still work the horizon at sunset.

Spice farms, seaweed cultivation and a distinctive Omani-Swahili food culture fill out the days between beaches.

Chapman's Peak Drive carves along sheer cliffs between Noordhoek and Hout Bay, the scenic centrepiece of a wider ride around the Cape Peninsula past Boulders Beach's penguins and the fynbos slopes near Cape Point.

The full loop, ridden each March by 35,000 cyclists in the Cape Town Cycle Tour, mixes ocean-cliff drama with quiet vineyard roads on the return leg.

Wind and open cliff edges make it a serious ride outside the closed-road race day.

At the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, where the Gulf of Suez meets the Gulf of Aqaba, Ras Mohammed protects some of the Red Sea's most vivid coral reef, with underwater visibility regularly exceeding 20 meters and walls that drop dramatically into deep blue water just offshore.

The Shark and Yolanda Reef dive sites are considered among the best in the world for the sheer density and variety of reef fish.

The Garden Route traces roughly 300 kilometres of South Africa's southern coast between Mossel Bay and Storms River, crossing indigenous forest, lagoons, and dramatic sea cliffs.

Knysna's lagoon and oyster shacks, Plettenberg Bay's beaches, and the canopy walkways of Tsitsikamma National Park make for constant stops.

Southern right whales gather off Plettenberg Bay for much of the year on this smooth, well-signed, easy self-drive route.

A white-sand beach a ten-minute drive from central Cape Town, backed by the granite spine of the Twelve Apostles and lined with a busy strip of palm-fringed restaurants and bars.

The water is bracingly cold thanks to the Atlantic's Benguela current, so most visitors come for the setting, the sunset and the promenade scene rather than long swims.

Few city beaches anywhere have a backdrop like it.

The historic heart of Zanzibar City is a dense maze of coral-stone buildings, carved wooden doors and narrow alleys shaped by centuries of Swahili, Arab, Persian and Indian trade and, more darkly, its role as East Africa's largest slave-trading port.

The old fort, sultan's palace and spice markets reflect that layered history, while rooftop restaurants and the Forodhani Gardens night market give it a genuinely lively present-day pulse.

A fortified Atlantic port town with whitewashed, blue-shuttered buildings and windswept ramparts, Essaouira trades the desert heat of Marrakech for sea breeze, fresh seafood grilled dockside, and some of Morocco's best windsurfing and kitesurfing conditions.

Its 18th-century medina, also UNESCO-listed, is smaller and calmer than Fes or Marrakech, with a strong arts and music scene reflected in its galleries and the annual Gnaoua music festival.

At the northern tip of Zanzibar, Nungwi combines the island's whitest sand with water clear enough to see reef fish from the shore.

Unlike beaches further south, it isn't affected by the tide pulling far out twice a day, so the swimming stays good all day.

Traditional dhow-building still happens on the sand alongside the resorts, and sunset dhow cruises out over the reef are a nightly ritual.

A laid-back diving town on the Gulf of Aqaba, Dahab trades Sharm el-Sheikh's resort scale for a mellow, backpacker-friendly waterfront lined with low-key restaurants right on the reef edge.

It's best known for the Blue Hole, a dramatic underwater sinkhole that's become one of the world's most famous — and most dangerous for unqualified divers — dive sites, alongside gentler reef diving and snorkeling directly off the shore in town.

A distinctly German-colonial coastal town where half-timbered buildings sit oddly against Atlantic surf and encroaching Namib dunes, Swakopmund has become Namibia's adventure-sports hub.

Sandboarding and quad-biking on the dunes at the town's edge, alongside skydiving and dolphin cruises, give it a livelier, more activity-driven scene than its quiet colonial streets suggest.

It's also the natural staging point for trips to the Skeleton Coast.

Far less developed than Zanzibar, Mafia Island sits within a marine park protecting some of East Africa's healthiest coral reefs and is one of the world's most reliable places to swim with whale sharks, which gather offshore between October and March.

The island's slow pace, quiet beaches and small-scale dive lodges attract a niche crowd of divers and snorkelers over the beach-resort tourists who head to Zanzibar instead.