About Corfu Beaches
Corfu Beaches is a free, independent guide to 139 beaches in the Ionian Islands of Greece. For every beach it shows how busy it is likely to be right now, how hard it is to park, and what the wind and sea are doing, so you can pick the right beach before you set off. It is available in nine languages, on the web and as an Android app.
How the crowd forecast works
Reports from people on the beach come first. When someone has reported how busy a beach is in the last two hours, that is what you see. Without recent reports, we look for past reports from similar moments: the same beach, the same time of year, a similar hour of the day, the same kind of day (weekday or weekend) and similar weather.
When there are no reports either, the forecast comes from a model that combines how popular the beach is with the month, the day of the week, the time of day and today's weather: heat brings people to the beach, while rain and onshore wind keep them away. Outside the swimming season, from mid-October to mid-May, every beach is shown as quiet. These are estimates, not head counts.
Parking
Each beach has a parking type (free, paid, roadside or none) and a baseline for how tight it is. How hard it is to find a space right now follows from that baseline and the crowd forecast, and recent parking reports from visitors take priority over the estimate.
Wind and sea
Wind, air temperature, rain, wave height and sea temperature come from the Open-Meteo weather and marine forecasts and are refreshed every 30 minutes. We know which way each beach faces, so we can tell whether the wind is blowing onto it (waves) or from behind it (calm water). On the Ionian islands that matters most when the summer maistros, a northwesterly, picks up in the afternoon.
Beach information, ratings and photos
Beach positions, facilities and nearby places come from OpenStreetMap, checked and corrected by hand. Ratings come from Google and Tripadvisor and are refreshed daily; we show them as they are. Photos are from Wikimedia Commons and Flickr under free licences, credited to their authors, plus a few used with permission.
Beach descriptions, guides and blog posts are written by us, and the guides and posts list their sources.
Independent and free
No beach, beach bar or business pays to appear on the site or to be ranked higher. The map, forecasts and beach pages are free to use without an account. Signing in, also free, lets you report crowds and parking, save beaches and read the getting-there guides for beaches reached only by boat or on foot.
Keeping it accurate
We review the beach information before every season. If something is wrong or out of date, use the “Report a mistake” link at the bottom of any page, or write to us through the contact form.