It isn’t very difficult to see why southern Spain’s Costa del Sol is such a hit with European holidaymakers. With its white-sand beaches and mountainside citrus groves, this stretch of Malaga coastline is a marvelous slice of pure Mediterranean, boasting an average of over 300 sunny days a year. In the past sixty years, the region has gone from backwater to big-time; today, the geography of the coast is a litany of high-end resort towns, like Marbella and Torre del Mar, which cater to the wealthier crowd.

Despite the Costa del Sol’s reputation as a seaside playground for the rich and famous, visitors willing to go beyond the beach may find themselves surprised by how much the region has to offer. They run the gamut from outdoorsy to intellectual, from windsurfing all the way to wine tasting. Malaga’s coast offers an array of adventures to suit every palate, each one flavored with the Costa del Sol’s unique Andalusia-meets-Mediterranean charm. (more…)

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Watch out! Here comes another one. We’re walking down the boardwalk in Oludeniz, Turkey which also doubles as a paragliding landing zone. It’s no wonder people leap from the surrounding mountains and glide down to a soft beach landing, into this bay that’s one of the most photographed areas of the Mediterranean coastline.

Oludeniz means “dead sea” in Turkish. The actual town is named Belcekiz, but if you walk a couple hundred meters down the beach, you reach a peninsula of sand which creates a sheltered lagoon. The still, deep blue water behind this spit of land is the “dead” calm sea.
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