Portobello Beach

Edinburgh has a beach, and it was named after a battle in Panama. In 1742, a retired sailor called George Hamilton built himself a cottage on what was then uninhabited moorland called Figgate Muir. Having served in the Royal Navy and participated in the 1739 capture of Porto Bello in Panama, he called his home "Portobello Hut." The name stuck as a settlement grew around it, and by the early nineteenth century Portobello had transformed into one of Britain's fashionable seaside resorts.

In 1822, over 50,000 people gathered on Portobello's sands to watch King George IV review troops and Highland clansmen during his famous visit to Scotland — the whole event orchestrated by Sir Walter Scott, who essentially staged-managed the king's entire Edinburgh trip. Salt-water bathing pools opened in 1807, a promenade was constructed, bandstands appeared, and Portobello's two-mile beach became Edinburgh's playground. The Victorian heyday brought swimming pools, funfairs, and day-trippers by the thousand — especially from Glasgow, where factory workers flooded east during the annual Glasgow Fair.

The decline came in the 1970s and '80s, when cheap overseas package holidays pulled families away from British seaside towns. Portobello's grand outdoor pool closed, the amusements faded, and the promenade grew quiet. But the twenty-first century brought a revival: the beach has become a favourite for wild swimmers, kite surfers, and Edinburgh families who'd rather face the bracing waters of the Firth of Forth than a two-hour drive to anywhere warmer.

The promenade still runs the full length of the beach, and on summer evenings the light over the Forth can be genuinely beautiful — pink skies reflecting off wet sand, the hills of Fife dark across the water. It's thirty minutes from the Royal Mile by bus, and it feels like another world entirely.