Best coastal towns in Queensland

Macleay Island tops the ranking, 213 m from the water with 84 rainy days in an average year. 12 of the 15 towns listed sit within a kilometre of the water. These 15 came from a field of 37 Queensland towns that cleared every gate.

In a straight line from the centre point of the suburb to the nearest point on the Digital Earth Australia Coastlines shoreline, and a town qualifies at 3,000 m or closer. It is not a walking route and not a distance from any particular street, so a large locality whose township sits inland of its own shoreline will read farther out than the walk from its main street would suggest. Read it as how coastal the town is, not as how long it takes to reach the water.

OpenStreetMap holds about 1,870 beaches for the whole of Australia and does not record which of them are on the ocean. Ranking on the nearest mapped beach therefore fails both ways: it would drop Nhulunbuy, Victor Harbor and Apollo Bay, which are all within 600 m of the sea but far from anything mapped as a beach, and it would admit Shepparton, which is close to a beach on the Goulburn River and 167 km from the ocean. The shoreline dataset has no such gaps. Where a named beach is mapped near a town we show how far it is, but it does not affect the ranking.

One number: days of rain a year, from Bureau of Meteorology 20-year normals at the nearest station within 50 km, inverted so a drier town scores higher. Temperatures are shown for each town but do not affect the order. That is a coverage decision — about half the stations in range record rainfall and no temperature, so ranking each town on whichever readings it happened to have would put two different measurements under one heading and sort them against each other. Sunshine hours are not part of this yet.

Brisbane's metro area is excluded out to 50 km from the CBD. Its beachside suburbs are suburbs of a capital city, and they would take most of the places on a list that promises coastal towns — different prices, different commutes, a different decision. Those suburbs are still ranked on the Brisbane pages.

Most often the population band: a town needs between 2,000 and 25,000 residents. The ceiling is deliberate — without it the large coastal cities would crowd out the small towns this list is about. A town also needs fewer than 50,000 people living within 10 km, which is what keeps beachside suburbs of the bigger coastal cities off the list: the suburb itself is small, the city around it is not. Otherwise the town sits farther than 3,000 m from the ocean, has no weather station within 50 km, or falls inside the capital's metro area. Closeness to the ocean is 35% of the score and rainfall 30%, so a town that clears every gate can still rank low on both.