Marina Beach

Marina Beach runs along the eastern edge of Chennai, on the Bay of Bengal, for around six kilometres from the harbour to Besant Nagar. It is among the longest urban beaches anywhere and, by most reckonings, the most visited beach in India.

It is not a swimming beach and that is official: the undertow here is severe, the shelf drops sharply, and bathing has been prohibited for decades. What the beach is instead is the city's public space — a promenade laid out under Governor Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff in the 1880s, statues along its length, food stalls, cricket on the sand, and gatherings that reach into the hundreds of thousands. It has been the site of major political funerals and of the 2017 jallikattu protests, when the sand held a crowd estimated in the high hundreds of thousands for a week.

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck here directly, killing several hundred people on and around the beach, most of them from the fishing communities whose settlements sit along it — those communities still work the shore and their boats are drawn up on the sand. The beach was widened substantially by the harbour breakwater built from 1876, which trapped sand moving north along the coast.

Facilities are those of a city front: the promenade, the aquarium, the ice house that once stored blocks shipped from Massachusetts, and a lighthouse that can be climbed. Elliot's Beach at the southern end is the quieter one that the city's students use, and Mahabalipuram's shore temples are an hour down the coast road.

Nobody swims at Marina and everyone goes. It is six kilometres of the city's public life — cricket, food carts, statues, protest, and the fishing communities whose boats are drawn up on the same sand the 2004 tsunami came over. The bathing ban is not a formality; the undertow is why.