These 20 Caribbean Beaches Are Made for Long Walks, From Anguilla to Aruba to Jamaica

There’s an old Jamaican expression that belongs naturally on a Caribbean beach: walk good.

It’s usually a goodbye, a wish for safe travels, a simple way of telling someone to take care. It also describes one of the Caribbean’s simplest pleasures: putting your feet in the sand and walking until it’s time to turn around.

Summer is starting to wind down, and fall Caribbean trips are coming into focus. The crowds change, the heat starts to ease in parts of the region, and a long beach walk starts sounding even better.

Some beaches are made for a swim. Others are small coves where a towel, a book and a few hours are enough. Then there are the beaches where the sand keeps going — broad, long strands where you can cover a mile, two miles or considerably more, passing beach bars, hotels, fishing boats, villas, palms and stretches where there may be almost nobody else around.

A great walking beach needs more than beauty. The sand has to cooperate. There has to be enough length to settle into a real walk. And the best ones give you something different as you go, whether it’s another beach bar ahead, a quiet residential section, a view across to another island or simply several more miles of white sand.

These are 20 of the best Caribbean beaches for a long walk, from Anguilla and Antigua to Aruba, Jamaica and The Bahamas.

Rendezvous Bay, Anguilla

A long arc of powdery white sand runs across Anguilla’s southwest coast, with Saint Martin filling the horizon across the channel and enough open beach to keep going long after most Caribbean walks would have ended. The bay is broad, beautifully undeveloped in long sections and remarkably quiet for a beach this good.

The sand near the water is ideal for walking, and the length gives you time to settle into a real stride. Resorts and villas appear along parts of the bay, then the beach opens again, with wide stretches where there may be little between you and the far end except footprints.

Few Caribbean beaches deliver this much at once: exceptional sand, serious distance, huge views and the kind of quiet that makes turning around surprisingly difficult.

Then there’s the legednary SunShine Shack, one of Anguilla’s essential beach bars, where grilled lobster, ribs, rum punch and tables in the sand provide a very persuasive reason to stop.

If the perfect Caribbean beach walk means white sand, room to roam, a neighboring island across the water and a beach bar waiting along the way, Rendezvous Bay is very hard to beat.