Marazion & Mount's Bay Beaches

This folder covers five beaches along the western shore of Mount's Bay, from the causeway beach at Marazion in the west to the family sands of Praa Sands in the east. At its heart is Marazion Beach, one of the most instantly recognisable stretches of sand in Cornwall, sitting directly opposite St Michael's Mount and reached by a tidal causeway that has carried pilgrims, traders and holidaymakers across the water for the best part of a thousand years. From there the coastline runs on through the small beach village of Perranuthnoe, the historic smugglers' cove at Prussia Cove, the wild and secluded Kenneggy Sands, and finally the mile-long family beach and village at Praa Sands - five beaches with five genuinely different characters, all within a few miles of one another.

Marazion Beach itself is a broad sweep of sand and pebble with a free grassy car park right behind it, a beachside pub with the best view in Cornwall, and RSPB Marazion Marsh - the largest reed bed in the county - tucked just behind the dunes. Perranuthnoe is a quieter, more village-like beach with a genuinely old inn and a well-regarded beach café. Prussia Cove trades sand for smuggling history - it was the base of the eighteenth-century "King of Prussia", the smuggler John Carter - and offers little in the way of visitor facilities by design. Kenneggy Sands is Mount's Bay's wild card: a secluded, tide-covered beach reached by a scramble down the cliffs, in the same spirit as Loe Bar in the neighbouring Porthleven folder. Praa Sands, by contrast, is a proper family beach with a village, shops, a beachside pub and seasonal RNLI lifeguard cover.

Newlyn, Penzance and Long Rock, at the northern end of Mount's Bay, are covered in this guide's separate Penzance folder, and Porthleven has its own folder further round the bay. Gunwalloe Church Cove, Poldhu Cove and Polurrian Cove, further south again towards the Lizard, belong to a future Lizard folder and are not covered here. The five pages in this folder have a full visitor guide to each beach - parking, facilities, disabled access information, a precise map, nearby things to do and places to stay - researched and kept up to date.