Why is Flamenco Beach so famous?

The 2013 placing, with its year attached

Flamenco was voted third best beach in the world in the 2013 TripAdvisor Travellers’ Choice awards. That is the sourced fact, and the year is part of it. It remains one of the beach’s best-known distinctions.

The Blue Flag, regained in 2016, is the other dated recognition.

The tanks

Two of them, left on the sand by the US Navy and never taken away. One stands nearer the west end and the other sits closer to the waterline. They are repainted constantly — graffiti over graffiti, so no photograph of them is current for long.

The date matters. The Navy used the Culebra archipelago as a gunnery and bombing range from 1939. Residents protested from 1970 to 1974, and in 1975 the Navy stopped using Culebra and moved those operations to Vieques, where they continued until 2003. 2003 is the Vieques date, twenty-eight years later. The tanks page handles the history properly, and the Culebra-or-Vieques page keeps the two dates apart.

The water, and what it is like

The bay is a horseshoe about a mile long on the island’s northwest coast, open to the North Atlantic. Swimming areas are marked with buoys and there are lifeguards. Recent photographs give a good idea of the water. What swimming there is actually like is the more useful page.

What famous does not mean here

It does not mean undiscovered. Roughly 1,792 people live on Culebra and a great many visitors arrive; the beach has kiosks, chair hire and a gate that charges a couple of dollars a head. On a busy morning you will not be alone on the sand. The place earns its reputation. It is worth planning the day of travel it takes to get there. That question has its own page.

Frequently asked questions