Praia do Cassino

Praia do Cassino begins at the Rio Grande breakwaters in southern Brazil and runs south, without interruption, for something in the order of two hundred kilometres to the Uruguayan border at Chuí. It is regularly cited as the longest continuous beach on earth, and while the measurement depends on where you decide it ends, the scale is not in dispute.

Its character comes from that length and from the coastal plain behind it — flat, sandy, thinly populated, with lagoons inland and almost no relief anywhere. This is the far south of Brazil, closer to Montevideo than to Rio, and the beach culture is correspondingly different: cooler, windier and without the tropical associations.

The sand is fine quartz, hard-packed enough that cars drive on it, and the beach is wide and shallow-sloped. The Atlantic here delivers steady swell and the water is cold by Brazilian standards — this is where the Falklands Current reaches. There are rips, and lifeguarding covers only the developed section near the town. The northern end has one feature worth the drive by itself: the Molhes da Barra, two rock breakwaters running five kilometres out to sea, which can be walked and which mark where the Patos lagoon — the largest in South America — meets the Atlantic.

Development is concentrated at the northern end: the resort district of Cassino itself, part of the city of Rio Grande, with hotels, a promenade and vehicle access onto the sand. South of that the beach empties completely and continues for a hundred and eighty kilometres past almost nothing, with the Taim wetland reserve inland.

Claimed as the longest beach in the world at something over two hundred kilometres, which nobody has much interest in measuring precisely. You can drive it. The water is brown from the Patos lagoon outflow, the wind never stops, and the interest is entirely in the scale rather than in the swim.