Beaches in Mozambique

Two and a half thousand kilometres of Indian Ocean coast, much of it undeveloped, with coral in the north around the Quirimbas and the Bazaruto archipelago and long open sand in the south. The wildlife is the reason most visitors come — whale sharks and manta rays off Tofo year-round, humpbacks passing between June and October, and dugong in the Bazaruto lagoon, one of the last viable populations in East Africa. The archipelagos are the register's cases of dune islands rather than coral ones: Bazaruto's sand is wind-built and its interior holds freshwater lakes, which is unusual for an island of that material. Ilha de Moçambique in the north, the former colonial capital, is a World Heritage site on a coral island connected to the mainland by a single-lane causeway three kilometres long. Portuguese is the working language, and the food along this coast — prawns, piri-piri, coconut — is one of the better reasons to be on it. Practically: infrastructure is thin, roads are slow, and internal flights are the practical way to move between the southern beaches and the northern islands. The wet season runs November to March with cyclone risk, and the north of the country has had a serious security situation in Cabo Delgado since 2017 that has closed parts of the Quirimbas to visitors. Malaria is present throughout.

Two of the three are grand ocean strands; the rest are sandbank and motu beaches. Together they account for 16 km of shore. · computed from the 3 records below