Skanör Beach

Skanör and Falsterbo occupy a peninsula at the very southern tip of Sweden, forty minutes from Malmö. The beaches run along a broad sand shelf where the Baltic meets the Øresund, and the water stays shallow for a very long way out.

The peninsula is one of the most important bird migration sites in Europe. Falsterbo funnels raptors and passerines heading south into a narrow point before the sea crossing to Denmark, and hundreds of thousands of birds pass in autumn; the bird observatory here has ringed continuously since 1955 and the counts are among the longest unbroken datasets in ornithology.

The beach is fine pale sand with dunes, salt meadow and juniper behind, and water that warms unusually well because of the shelf — the low twenties in a good August, which for Sweden is exceptional. It freezes in hard winters. The medieval towns of Skanör and Falsterbo behind were built on the herring trade that made this the busiest market in northern Europe in the fourteenth century, before the herring moved. The medieval towns behind the beach still have their street pattern from the herring years, and the church at Skanör dates from the thirteenth century.

Development is a low town of wooden houses, a golf course on the point and a nature reserve covering much of the peninsula. Cars are kept back from the sand. Malmö and Copenhagen are both within an hour, which makes this the nearest real beach to two capitals. Falsterbo's lighthouse at the point marks the turn Baltic shipping makes here, and the golf links behind it are among the oldest in Sweden.

Low twenties in August on a sand shelf that goes out for ever, which for Sweden is exceptional. Then in autumn several hundred thousand birds funnel over the point before the crossing to Denmark, and the observatory has counted them without a break since 1955.