Sun, sand & smiles: World’s happiest beaches

Few things are as enjoyable as a day at the beach.

To discover which beaches bring the most joy, CV Villas, a luxury villa rental company, used advanced technology to find the world’s happiest beaches.

To determine this, CV Villas looked at 103 popular beaches from around the world and analysed over 1,000 Instagram photos tagged with each beach. They used AWS Rekognition software to detect positive facial expressions and calculated a smile score for each beach based on the number of smiles in the photos.

The results showed that European beaches topped the list. Sitges Beach near Barcelona, Spain, was the happiest beach, followed by other Mediterranean beaches. Portugal and Greece also made strong showings, with the Mediterranean being the top destination for joyful beach getaways.

In total, 23 of the top 30 happiest beaches are in Europe, with all of the top 10 spots taken by European locations.

Sitges Beach took the top spot with an almost perfect smile score of 98.42 out of 100.

In second place was Praia da Falésia in Southern Portugal, scoring 97.24.

Third place went to Port de Soller in Mallorca, with a score of 96.95.

Portugal’s Praia Dona Ana also ranked, coming in seventh with a score of 94.31, further highlighting the country’s beach appeal.

Greece made a strong showing too, with five beaches in the top 20. Elafonisi Beach in Crete, with its pink sands, landed in ninth place with a score of 93.34. Ai Helis Beach in Kefalonia rounded out the top 10 with a score of 92.25.