About Playas Cerca

Playas Cerca lists 3,554 Spanish beaches with their water temperature, wind and UV index. It is published by EPAK Vibes. The weather comes from Open-Meteo and the beach registry from Spain's environment ministry (MITECO) — both are named and linked below, along with how often each one actually changes. Found something wrong? Write to us.

Why Playas Cerca exists

Spain has thousands of public beaches, and the official information about them is real but hard to use: the ministry publishes a registry with coordinates, sand type, length and facilities, while the sea and weather conditions live in a separate forecasting model. Neither answers the question people actually ask, which is whether it is worth going to this beach today.

This site joins those two datasets. Each beach page combines what the registry records about the place with today's modelled water temperature, wind and UV, so you can compare beaches on the things that change the experience rather than on photographs. Regional and city pages roll the same numbers up so you can see, for example, that the sea off Galicia and the sea off Murcia are not remotely the same swim on the same day.

We do not accept payment for placement or for a better position in any ranking. The site is funded by advertising and by affiliate links, which are labelled where they appear and set out in full on the affiliate disclosure page.

Data sources

Everything on the site comes from the four sources below. If a source is not on this list, we do not use it.

Two things worth saying plainly. Blue Flag status is whatever the ministry's registry records for the current edition — the award itself belongs to the Foundation for Environmental Education, which we are not affiliated with, and a flag can be withdrawn during a season without the registry catching up. And the ministry's own Guía de Playas application is no longer running, so the registry we hold is a static export rather than a live feed; the edition date is in the footer of every page.

How often we update

Water temperature is modelled, not measured. Open-Meteo's marine model gives a sea-surface value on roughly an 8 km grid, in six-hourly steps, and the model itself is refreshed once a day. So the number you see is the model's estimate for the water off that stretch of coast, not a reading taken at the shoreline. Actual temperature at the water's edge varies with depth, currents, river outflow and time of day — shallow bays warm up in the afternoon, and a cold current can put several degrees between two beaches that share a grid cell. Treat it as a reliable guide to whether the sea is cold, fresh, pleasant or warm, and not as a thermometer.

Because the marine model only moves once a day, the water temperature can legitimately show the same value on two visits hours apart. That is the model, not a stale cache.

How the guides are written

The 5 guides are editorial, written and maintained by the Playas Cerca editorial process at EPAK Vibes rather than credited to an individual author — we would rather name the publisher we can stand behind than invent a byline. They are written against the same two datasets the rest of the site uses: the MITECO registry for what a place has, and the Open-Meteo series for what its conditions look like across the year.

What that means in practice: claims about facilities are taken from the registry, not from memory; claims about temperature ranges and seasons come from the modelled series rather than from a general impression of "warm south, cold north"; and where a guide gives an opinion — which beaches suit families, which are worth the drive — it is presented as an opinion, with the data it rests on stated. Guides carry their own revision date, so a revised guide says so instead of inheriting a site-wide date.

Where a guide reads on live data, such as the water-temperature guide, the numbers in it are pulled at page load from the same cache as the beach pages, and the date shown reflects that refresh.

Corrections

Found an error? Write to us. We aim to correct verified errors within 24 hours. If the mistake is in the ministry's registry rather than in our handling of it, we will say so and, where we can, note the correct value on the page while the registry catches up.

Useful things to include: the page URL, what it says, and what it should say. Facility data is the most common source of complaints, and the most common cause is the registry recording an absence rather than the facility genuinely not existing — see the note on every beach page.

Contact

Corrections, data questions, press and partnerships all go to the same place: epakvibes.com/contact. Formal identification of the publisher, as required by Spanish law, is on the legal notice page; how the site is funded is on the affiliate disclosure page.

This page was last reviewed on 19 September 2026.