About Playas Cerca
Playas Cerca lists 3,554 Spanish beaches with their water temperature, wind and UV index. It is published by EPAK Vibes. Water temperatures come from coastal buoys (via Copernicus Marine) where one is close enough, and otherwise from the Open-Meteo marine model; wind, air temperature and UV come from Open-Meteo, and the beach registry from Spain's environment ministry (MITECO). All are named and linked below, along with how often each one actually changes. Found something wrong? Write to us.
Publisher
EPAK Vibes — publisher and operator of playascerca.com. The same publisher runs golfnear.io and other data sites, which is why you will see cross-links between them.
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 sea and weather conditions live elsewhere, in buoy networks and forecasting models. 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 water temperature (measured by a buoy or estimated by a model, and the page says which), 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 five sources below. If a source is not on this list, we do not use it. We do not call the weather sources from this site: a shared data store run by the same publisher fetches each one once and picks the value for every beach, and the site reads that.
| Source | What it provides | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Copernicus Marine — In Situ, Iberia–Biscay–Ireland | Water temperature measured by coastal buoys of Puertos del Estado and INTECMAR, for beaches within 15 km of a buoy (735 beaches today) | Copernicus Marine Service licence |
| Open-Meteo — Marine API | Water temperature estimated by the marine model (sea_surface_temperature) where no buoy is close enough (2,819 beaches today) |
CC BY 4.0 |
| Open-Meteo — Forecast API | Wind speed, UV index, air temperature | CC BY 4.0 |
| MITECO — Guía de Playas registry | 3,554 beaches: name, coordinates, municipality and province, sand type, length and width, Blue Flag status, and around 25 facility fields (showers, toilets, parking, lifeguard, wheelchair access…) | Spanish public-sector information, reusable with attribution (Ley 37/2007) |
| golfnear.io | Nearby golf courses shown on beach and region pages | Same publisher (EPAK Vibes) |
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
| Data | Refresh |
|---|---|
| Water temperature from a buoy | Every hour, as the buoy reports. The page gives the time of the reading. |
| Water temperature from the marine model | Once a day, when the model is fetched. The page gives the hour the estimate is for and when it was fetched. |
| Wind, air temperature, UV index | Four times a day from the forecast model, shown for the current hour. |
| Beach registry (facilities, Blue Flag, dimensions) | Static MITECO export, current edition March 2026. It changes only when the ministry publishes a new one. |
| Golf courses | Manual sync from golfnear.io. |
| Guides | Reviewed when the underlying data moves; each guide carries its own revision date. |
Water temperature is measured by a buoy or estimated by a model, and never taken at the beach itself. Where a buoy is within 15 km (735 of the 3,554 beaches today), the number is that buoy's latest reading, and the page names the buoy, its owner and the distance. A buoy measures the water where it is moored, often at a harbour mouth or offshore, so the water at the beach can differ. Everywhere else the number is Open-Meteo's marine-model estimate: a sea-surface value on roughly an 8 km grid, with the model refreshed once a day, for the water off that stretch of coast rather than 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, a modelled number can legitimately show the same value on two visits hours apart; a buoy number changes every hour. If a source stops delivering, the beach page shows the last value with its date for up to a week, and no list or map ranks it.
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 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 read at page load from the same data 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.
Playas Cerca is not a safety service. Nothing here is a substitute for the flag flying on the beach, a lifeguard, or local civil-protection advice. We do not receive live bathing bans, water-quality closures, jellyfish warnings or red-flag status. Check local signage and the local authority before you swim, and do not use this site to decide whether the sea is safe.
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 .