Beach Science · October 2026 · 3 min

Steps Per Metre of Sand: A Ranking Nobody Asked For

Praia do Camilo charges three steps for every metre of beach. We did the division for eight more.

The guides to the Algarve will tell you how many steps lead down to a beach. They do not tell you whether the beach is worth the steps. So we invented a unit. Take the number of steps down. Divide by the length of sand at the bottom. The answer is what each metre of that beach costs you, payable twice.

What the number says

Camilo is in a league of its own. Two hundred steps for 66 metres of sand is three steps a metre, more than three times the next beach on the list. The local guide says plainly that the staircase is why Camilo is quieter than Dona Ana next door. The price keeps people out. That is what a price is for.

Marinha costs the same 200 steps and gives you more than three times the beach. It is also full from April to October, which suggests that people will pay 0.9 steps a metre without complaint and start to think about it somewhere before 3.0.

Every metre of this beach costs three steps down and three steps back up.

At the other end, Falésia. Sixty steps at Pine Cliffs buy 1,334 metres of sand, and from the village of Olhos de Água the way in is flat, which makes the ratio zero and the science unnecessary. In Albufeira they went further and installed an elevator.

The limits of the research

A beach is more than its length, and a step in a hand-carved tunnel with a rope for a handrail is not the same step as one on a wooden staircase. Carvalho's thirty count for more than thirty. We have not yet invented a unit for that.

One question stays open, and it is yours: would you rather have the beach nobody else will walk down to, or your knees?