Four Mile Beach

Four Mile Beach runs south from Port Douglas, an hour north of Cairns in far north Queensland. It is six and a half kilometres of golden sand with the Coral Sea in front and the Daintree rainforest beginning a few kilometres north.

The town sits between two World Heritage sites — the Great Barrier Reef offshore and the Wet Tropics rainforest inland — which is a combination that exists nowhere else, and the Daintree is the oldest continuously surviving tropical rainforest on earth at around a hundred and eighty million years.

Two things govern swimming here and both are taken seriously. Box jellyfish and Irukandji are present from roughly November to May, and the stinger net at the beach's northern end is where people swim in that season; full-body suits are supplied and worn as routine rather than as caution. Saltwater crocodiles inhabit the estuaries along this coast year-round, and the signs at the creek mouths are not decorative — a crocodile was removed from this beach in 2017. Sugar built the modern town before tourism did, and the cane trains still run behind the coast road in the crushing season.

Development is a low resort town with a marina, from which the reef boats leave. Port Douglas was a gold port that collapsed to a few hundred people and was rebuilt as a resort from the 1980s. Cape Tribulation, ninety minutes north across the Daintree River ferry, is where the rainforest reaches the sand directly and where the road effectively ends.

Two World Heritage sites within an hour of each other and two hazards on the sand between them. In stinger season the net at the northern end is where you swim, in a full-body suit, and the crocodile signs at the creek mouths are load-bearing. Between May and October none of that applies and it is simply an excellent beach.