Discover Vancouver

Wreck Beach

Vancouver is blessed with about 56 kilometres (35 miles) of beaches, all of them public, most of them developed. They are all worth visiting, but Wreck Beach, just some hundred steps below the University of British Columbia, is the most beautiful, the least developed and the most controversial because it is clothing optional. On sunny days more than a thousand naked sun worshipers can congregate here. The beach's name was given it for the now vanished hulk of a wrecked vessel here.

Nude sunbathers and beach vendors have flocked to the six kilometre strip, hidden around the corner from Spanish Banks, since the 1920s.