The top 10 best, most beautiful beaches in Tasmania

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The top 10 best, most beautiful beaches in Tasmania

By Andrew Bain
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Tasmania is a natural artwork framed by the most beautiful of beaches. Be it white-sand wonders along the east coast, sandy shows of power in the west, or even beaches set into mountains, the island state is a land of strands. Here are 10 of our favourites.

Wineglass Bay

Pretty much the prototype of the perfect beach, and Tasmania's most famous coastal moment, Wineglass Bay has many angles. View it from the lookout platform clipped onto the slopes of the Hazards, scramble up Mount Amos for a broader view, or hike down onto the white sands themselves. The beach's name is less quixotic than you may imagine – it referred to the colour of the water, which ran red with blood from a whaling station at its southern end.

Boat Harbour Beach

Black and white has never looked so good. At this little piece of perfection at the foot of Table Cape on the Bass Strait coast, a gleaming white strip of sand is split by tongues of black volcanic rock. The colour of the water is spectacular when the sun is in a happy mood, and there's a cafe in the beachfront surf club to help you linger.

Trousers Point

Imagine Mount Wellington rising up from the shores of the Bay of Fires and you pretty much have the picture of this stunner near the southern edge of Flinders Island. There's a long, soft beach here, but all the beauty is packed into a tiny corner, pincered between granite headlands and lined with knuckles of rock. Adding to the scene are the 782-metre-high Strzelecki Peaks standing immediately behind.

Coningham Beach

How does a beach this fine, this close to a capital city, stay so anonymous? Just a half-hour drive from Hobart, Coningham is bookended by colourful boat sheds and sandstone cliffs vaguely reminiscent of Maria Island's Painted Cliffs. The north-facing beach is protected from most weather, creating calm swimming conditions in full view of Mount Wellington.

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See also: Twenty reasons to visit Hobart

Bridport

There's no lack of beach options in seaside Bridport, but the showstopper is Murphys Beach at the town's northern edge. Here, the remains of an old pier stretch out into Bass Strait like a series of survey pegs, while the granite boulders around Mermaids Pool provide a high-tide launch pad for the many who want to leap into the sea.

Crescent Bay

It takes work to enjoy Crescent Bay – it's about a 90-minute walk in from near Port Arthur – but the rewards are manifold. The perfectly curved beach, where Dick Smith once proposed building a resort, peers across the water to Tasman Island and the Blade on Cape Pillar, but the best of the beach is its back wall – the spectacular dunes that tower up from the sands. Generations of Tasmanian children have used these dunes for sand-boarding thrills.

Fortescue Bay

A favourite summer campground, Fortescue Bay is cut deep enough into Australia's highest sea cliffs that it provides well-sheltered swimming despite the fury of the sea and coastline around it. It's the starting point for walking trails to Cape Hauy and a shipwreck in Canoe Bay, and the finish of the Three Capes Track, but the lagoon-backed beach is a star feature in its own right.

Bay of Fires

Pick a beach, any beach. This most striking slice of Tasmanian coast is a combination of white sand, azure seas and granite headlands smothered in orange lichen. Drive north from Binalong Bay to The Gardens, beach-hopping along the way, or stretch things out with a four-day hike along the beaches with the Bay of Fires Lodge Walk or wukalina walk.

See also: A new way to do one of Australia's most beautiful walks

Ocean Beach

Tasmania's longest beach is impressive for its power alone – this is no swimming beach. Stretching more than 30 kilometres north from Macquarie Heads near Strahan, the hard-packed, hard-pounded beach is the place to watch the Southern Ocean roar ashore – an 18-metre-high wave was recorded just offshore a few years ago. The beach is just a few minutes' drive from Strahan, or you can walk in through the expansive Henty Dunes for the full sand experience.

Lake Rhona

Not all of Tasmania's best beaches are found on the coast. Lake Pedder's famous pink-sand beach may be long drowned, but tucked into the slopes of the Denison Range behind Mount Field is this incredible alpine lake beach with its white sands in high contrast to the lake's stout-coloured water. It's a full day's walk in, so you'll just have to camp the night on the beach, damn it.

Take a look at Tasmania's 10 most beautiful beaches in the gallery above.

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