The costas of Spain, one map

How many costas does Spain have?

There is no official register. The costas are names, not administrative units — most of them coined during the tourism boom of the mid–twentieth century, a few of them older, and several of them overlapping. Spain has roughly 8,000 km of coastline spread across ten mainland regions and two archipelagos, and where you draw the line between one costa and the next is partly a matter of which sign you read.

The oldest of the names is the Costa Brava, used in print from 1908. The rest followed in the 1950s and 1960s, when each province wanted a name a travel agent could sell. That is why the Costa de Barcelona, the Costa del Garraf and the Costa del Maresme all describe pieces of the same province — and why the Costa Valenciana and the Costa del Azahar are sometimes treated as one coast and sometimes as two.

CostaMap maps sixteen named stretches of mainland coast plus the Balearic Islands. Where names compete, we keep the one used locally and on signage.

The Mediterranean, south to north

• Costa Tropical — Granada’s short, steep coast between Nerja and Motril, where the Sierra Nevada drops almost straight into the sea. Subtropical fruit grows on the terraces above Almuñécar and Salobreña.
• Costa del Sol — The Málaga coast, and the most developed shoreline in Spain: Málaga city, Torremolinos, Marbella and Nerja, with the white villages of the Axarquía and Ronda in the hills behind.
• Costa de Almería — The driest coast in Europe. Cabo de Gata’s volcanic headlands and empty coves sit beside the greenhouse plains of El Ejido and the old mining towns of the Levante Almeriense.
• Costa Cálida — Murcia’s “warm coast”, built around the Mar Menor lagoon — shallow, warm and separated from the Mediterranean by the sandbar of La Manga — and the naval city of Cartagena.
• Costa Blanca — Alicante province: Benidorm and Torrevieja at one end of the scale, the coves of the Marina Alta and the cliffs of Cap de la Nau at the other. The stretch this site knows best.
• Costa Valenciana — The Valencia coast — long city beaches, the rice fields and lagoon of the Albufera, and the sandy shores of Gandia and the Safor.
• Costa del Azahar — The “orange blossom coast” of Castellón, named for the citrus groves inland. Peñíscola’s walled headland and the wetlands of the Serra d’Irta are the landmarks.
• Costa Dorada — Tarragona’s wide golden beaches, Roman Tarraco, the theme parks around Salou and the Ebro Delta — the largest wetland on the Catalan coast.
• Costa del Garraf — A short, dramatic stretch southwest of Barcelona where the Garraf massif meets the sea. Sitges is the anchor; the limestone hills behind it are a natural park.
• Costa de Barcelona — The coastline of Barcelona province as a whole — city beaches, the Maresme to the north, the Garraf to the south, and the Penedès wine country just inland.
• Costa del Maresme — The commuter coast north of Barcelona: Mataró, Calella and Canet, a continuous line of beaches served by one of Spain’s oldest railways.
• Costa Brava — Girona’s “wild coast”, and the one that started the naming habit in 1908. Pine-backed coves, Cadaqués, Begur and the Cap de Creus headland.

The Atlantic and Cantabrian coasts

• Costa de la Luz — Atlantic, not Mediterranean: the Cádiz and Huelva coast of long open beaches, Atlantic wind at Tarifa, and the Doñana wetlands.
• Costa Verde — Asturias — the “green coast”, where cliffs, river mouths and small fishing ports sit below the Picos de Europa.
• Costa de Cantabria — Cantabria’s beaches and estuaries, from Santander’s bay to the dunes of Oyambre and the medieval town of Santillana del Mar.
• Costa Vasca — The Basque coast: San Sebastián’s La Concha, the flysch cliffs at Zumaia, and Bilbao’s estuary reaching inland.

The islands

• Illes Balears — Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera — not a costa in the mainland sense, but part of the same Mediterranean shoreline and mapped here alongside it.

What “mapped” means here

Every coast above has its own page and its own map. What differs is depth: 229 places are on the map so far, sorted into ten kinds — historic sites, towns, natural parks, museums, viewpoints, beaches, villages, theme parks, hiking trails and marinas. The Costa Blanca is the most complete, because that is where the project started. New places are added coast by coast rather than spread thinly across all seventeen at once.

Each place gets the same treatment: where it is, what it actually is, how to reach it, when to go, and what is worth seeing nearby. No affiliate ranking, no invented star ratings — just the location and an honest description. If a place is quiet in November, the page says so.