Fake Beach Police · Case 001 · October 2026 · 4 min
Three Travel Lists Are Still Sending You to a Beach That Closed in 2022
Navagio is on three published lists of the clearest water on Earth. Nobody has been allowed to swim in it since 2022.
The Fake Beach Police check travel lists against the record. The lists are confident, well photographed and, quite often, years out of date. This is the first case.
The charge
Three published lists of the world's clearest water name Navagio Beach, on Zakynthos. All three were online when we checked on 10 October 2026. None of them mentions that the beach is closed.
| The list | Published | What it tells you about Navagio |
|---|---|---|
| Condé Nast Traveler, the world's clearest waters | 2016 | That the cliffs on either side may be what keeps the water pure. The sentence begins with Perhaps. |
| Travelzoo, 20 bluest waters in the world | 2024 | A tiny cove, clear water and a famous shipwreck. Number 16. |
| Yahoo Travel, from Reader's Digest | no date on the page | That the sea is the only way to reach it, and that the view from the platform on the cliff is the real draw. |
The three list pages as we cached them on 10 October 2026.
The record
Greece's national tourism site says Navagio “remains closed for safety reasons and maintenance works”, and that getting off the boat is not permitted. The sand and the bay have been closed since 2022, after the risk of rockfall was assessed. The cliff had already come down once, in 2018, and injured seven people. In June 2026 the ban was extended through 31 October 2026, after a tourist fell near the viewpoint. It is reviewed about twice a year and there is no reopening date.
The famous platform on the cliff is still there. Its outer edge has been fenced off.
The clearest water on Earth, which you may look at from a boat.
Nobody measured it either
None of the three lists gives a number for how clear the water is. No visibility in metres, no water-quality grade. We pulled the ten beaches these lists name most often, and nine of them have no measurement of clarity in any source we could find. The one figure that exists is the share of online reviews that use the words clear water.
The verdict
Guilty of not checking. A list written in 2016 is still recommending a beach that closed in 2022, and a list written in 2024 recommended it two years after the fact. The beach did what beaches under soft cliffs do. The lists are the ones that stopped paying attention.
What to do instead
Boats still enter the bay: €25 to €30 from three ports, and the 9am boat has the fewest people in your photo. Our own entry rates Navagio the lowest we go. If the point was clear water you can actually get into, try Prasonisi on Rhodes, where the sea reached 27.4°C in August 2025.
The beaches in this post
- Navagio Beach, ZakynthosABSOLUTELY THE FUCK NOT
- Prasonisi Beach, RhodesWORTH A DETOUR
Receipts
- Visit Greece, Navagio Beach: closed, no disembarkation (official tourism site)
- The National Herald: Greece extends the ban on visiting Navagio
- SchengenVisaInfo: the inspection behind the closure
- Condé Nast Traveler, The World's Clearest Waters (2016)
- Travelzoo, 20 bluest waters in the world
- Yahoo Travel, beaches with the clearest water
- Boat prices and the fenced viewpoint (welcometozante.com, passportnomads.com)
- Sea temperature: Open-Meteo Marine, 2025 monthly data at the beach's coordinates