Cox's Bazar: World's Longest Natural Sea Beach

Cox's Bazar is a town built on a single extraordinary fact of geography: a gently sloping sheet of sand that runs south along the Bay of Bengal for some 120 kilometres, widely described as the longest natural sea beach in the world. It is the headquarters of Cox's Bazar District in south-eastern Bangladesh, a fishing port and the country's dominant seaside resort, about 150 kilometres south of Chittagong. But the beach is only the beginning of the place's story. Cox's Bazar began as a refugee outpost, takes its name from an East India Company officer sent to settle displaced people in 1799, and today carries a double weight: the largest concentration of domestic tourism in Bangladesh, and, in the same district, one of the largest refugee populations on earth. Between those poles sits a working coast — of fishing boats, drying yards, an army-built coastal road and an airport straining to become international — whose future depends on how well the sand itself survives.

The beach and the world's-longest claim

The beach runs from the town's edge south towards Teknaf, near the Myanmar border, in one long, gently sloping curve of sand. The standard figure given for its length is about 120 kilometres (75 miles); some accounts put the unbroken stretch at up to 150 kilometres, and the difference reflects tides, mud flats and where one chooses to say the beach ends. What is consistent is the beach's shape: roughly 200 metres wide at high tide and about 400 metres at low tide, with a shallow gradient that lets the surf roll in slowly.

The superlative attached to it needs care. Cox's Bazar is routinely described — by Bangladeshi tourism promotion, by the press and by guidebooks — as "the world's longest natural sea beach" or "the world's longest unbroken natural sandy beach". It is not, however, a certified world record. Guinness World Records recognised Praia do Cassino in Brazil as the world's longest beach in 1994; that shoreline is measured at between 212 and 254 kilometres. Australia's Eighty Mile Beach, at about 220 kilometres, is also longer. Comparative listings generally place Cox's Bazar third or fourth among the world's longest beaches, and first in Asia. The honest version of the claim, then, is that this is Asia's longest natural beach and one of the longest unbroken sandy shores anywhere — remarkable enough without the promotion. The claim has nonetheless done real work for the town: the beach was a nominee in the New7Wonders of Nature campaign in 2008, and the "world's longest" label remains the core of how Bangladesh markets the place.

A market named for Captain Cox

The coast's recorded history starts long before the name. The greater Chittagong region, including what is now Cox's Bazar, was ruled by the kings of Arakan from the early ninth century until the Mughal conquest of 1666; afterwards it passed in turn to the Tipras, the Arakanese, the Portuguese and finally the British. The settlement itself was known as Palongkee, and it stood on a contested frontier where people displaced from Arakan — now Myanmar's Rakhine State — repeatedly arrived in search of safety.

The decisive displacement came in 1784, when the Burmese king Bodawpaya conquered Arakan. About 13,000 Arakanese are recorded as fleeing to the Cox's Bazar area, taking refuge at Palongkee, where their presence sharpened a long-running conflict with the local Rakhine population. The East India Company responded by appointing Captain Hiram Cox — a company officer who had served as an emissary to the Burmese court in 1796–98 — as Superintendent of the Palongkee outpost in early 1799, with instructions to settle the conflict and rehabilitate the refugees. Cox made significant progress in that work, but he died the same year, in 1799, before it was finished; historians cited in Bangladeshi reporting say he died of malaria at his bungalow in nearby Ramu. To commemorate his role, a market was established and named after him: Cox's Bazar, "Cox's market". In time the market's name became the name of the whole town, which was formally established in 1854 and became a municipality in 1869. The place also kept an older local name, Panowa — "yellow flower".

It is worth pausing on what this origin means. Cox's Bazar was not founded as a resort or a port but as an attempt to settle refugees on a difficult frontier, and its modern identity has returned to that theme. The Rakhine and Buddhist heritage of this coast survives inland, around Ramu, a short distance from the beach.

One beach, many shores

Although it is a single shoreline, the beach is experienced as a series of named places, and each has a distinct character. At the foot of the town is Laboni, the main beach point: the closest sand to the hotels and bus stands, and on holidays the most crowded stretch of coast in Bangladesh. Just south are Sugandha and Kolatoli, the other town points. Kolatoli is the heart of the hotel-motel zone — hundreds of properties crowd the roads behind the beach — and it is where the Marine Drive begins.

About 12 kilometres south, the coast changes. At Himchhari, forested hills come down to the sea, and the beach narrows beneath them. Behind the shore is Himchhari National Park, established in 1980, a tract of tropical rainforest and grassland with a waterfall that runs strongest in the monsoon. Further south again — roughly 30 kilometres from town, though published distances vary between about 25 and 35 — is Inani, the quiet counterpoint to Laboni. Inani is known for the coral stones scattered along its shore, boulders that look black and green against the sand, and for clearer water and thinner crowds. Beyond Inani the beach runs on, emptier and emptier, towards Patuartek and ultimately Teknaf — the great majority of the 120 kilometres sees few visitors at all. The geography of Cox's Bazar tourism is thus sharply concentrated: almost everything happens on the few kilometres nearest the town, and the pressures described below fall on that narrow strip.

The working coast: fishing and shutki

Long before it was a resort, Cox's Bazar was a fishing coast, and the fishing economy still dwarfs tourism in the lives of many local families. The emblem of that economy is shutki — fish preserved by sun-drying — and its centre is Nazirar Tek, a sandbar settlement about seven kilometres from town at the mouth of the Bakkhali River. Nazirar Tek is the largest dried-fish processing area in Bangladesh. Its modern growth began with displacement: families made homeless by the catastrophic cyclone of 1991 settled on the sandbar and turned their fishing knowledge into an industry.

In season, the scale is industrial. Nazirar Tek holds about 600 drying yards, known as mahals, and at the start of the 2026–27 season more than 800 yards across the district were together turning out over 150 tonnes of dry fish a day, with producers expecting a season's output worth around Tk 500 crore. Around 25 to 30 species are dried — pomfret, ribbonfish, Bombay duck, barramundi, shrimp and more — laid out on bamboo racks through the dry months from about November to April or May. The numbers attached to the trade depend on who is counting. The district fisheries office recorded 39,500 tonnes of dry fish produced in the district in the 2025–26 financial year, and set a target of 42,000 tonnes for 2026–27. Traders, by contrast, put Nazirar Tek's own seasonal output at 50,000 to 60,000 tonnes, worth over Tk 400 crore a year, and employing about 20,000 workers, most of them women. A UNDP account estimates district production higher still, at around 150,000 tonnes a year meeting most of the country's dried-fish demand. The gap between the figures is itself informative: this is a largely informal industry, estimated more often than it is counted.

It is also an industry with documented shadows. Child labour in the drying yards has been recorded by development organisations, and the use of harmful chemicals and pesticides on drying fish — to speed the process or keep insects off — has been reported for years — a recurring food-safety concern.

Tourism at scale

The transformation of Cox's Bazar into Bangladesh's biggest domestic tourism destination is visible in the hotel zone behind Kolatoli: more than 500 hotels, motels, resorts and cottages, able by their owners' association's count to hold around 168,000 guests at a time. Visitation follows the calendar of Bangladeshi holidays. In the ten-day holiday period of October 2026, tourism businesses expected at least 1.5 million visitors and trade worth Tk 12–15 billion across hotels, restaurants, transport and shops; for the eight days after Eid-ul-Fitr in March 2026, the expectation was over 900,000 visitors. Foreign tourists remain a small minority; this is, overwhelmingly, Bangladesh holidaying in Bangladesh. The season peaks in the cooler, drier months from November to March, but the sharpest pressure comes in a few holiday weeks when the town's population effectively multiplies.

The pressure on the sand

The cost of that concentration is now documented from several directions. The most visible is erosion. Reporting by The Financial Express in September 2026 recorded locals' claims that at least 500 feet of the beach's sandy stretch had disappeared into the sea over the previous five years, at the very town points — Laboni, Sugandha and Kolatoli — where tourism is densest. Geobags dumped along the shore as a defence had torn, shifted or been undermined by the waves. Those interviewed blamed a combination of unchecked sand extraction, the destruction of the dunes and casuarina vegetation that once armoured the beach, and unplanned urbanisation pressing onto the sand; erosion bites hardest in the monsoon. District officials said erosion-prone areas were being mapped and a project proposal prepared for permanent works.

Academic work reaches similar conclusions. A 2026 study of tourism's impacts in Cox's Bazar, published in the Geojournal of Tourism and Geosites, found development had been largely unregulated, and linked it to beach erosion, habitat loss, marine and plastic pollution, contamination and over-extraction of the freshwater the hotel zone depends on, alongside rising land values and widening inequality. The waste problem is literal as well as statistical: in 2026, environmentalists objected when an artificial canal was cut through the sand near Kolatoli to drain the hotel-motel zone, carrying waste-laden water straight into the sea and slicing pits and channels into the beach. A beach marketed on its unbroken length is, at its most visited point, being cut, drained and built over.

The Marine Drive

The instrument that opened up the southern beach is the Cox's Bazar–Teknaf Marine Drive, an 80-kilometre road that runs from Kolatoli down the coast to Teknaf, with the Bay of Bengal on one side and green hills on the other for much of its length. It was built by the Bangladesh Army's engineers under the Roads and Highways Department, at a cost of about Tk 1,050 crore, and inaugurated on 6 May 2017, billed — like the beach itself — with a superlative, as the world's longest marine drive. The road turned Himchhari and Inani into easy day trips and carried tourism, land speculation and settlement deep into what had been a quiet coast of fishing villages. It is also exposed to the same forces as the beach: a storm in August 2023 damaged at least ten sections, and at one point a stretch of the road disappeared into the sea. A widening project was approved in 2022. At its southern end, the road reaches Teknaf, from where boats cross to Saint Martin's Island, the coral island at the very end of this coast.

An airport reaching for international status

The newest layer of the town's ambition is its airport, at the northern edge of the town. Upgrading it to international standard began in 2021. The runway has been extended in stages to 10,700 feet — the longest in Bangladesh — with 1,700 feet of the extension built on 43 hectares reclaimed from the Bay of Bengal, so that aircraft land and take off over the sea. The extended runway can handle wide-body aircraft such as the Boeing 777-300ER and 747-400. Beside it stands a new international passenger terminal of about 17,956 square metres with a shell-shaped roof, built for roughly Tk 363 crore; the Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh (CAAB) expects capacity to rise from about 730,000 to 1.8 million passengers a year.

The airport's history shows how announcement and reality can diverge. In October 2025 a government gazette declared Cox's Bazar the country's fourth international airport — and the status was annulled just eleven days later, after airlines showed too little interest in flying there. Work continued regardless: trial operations at the new terminal began on 28 September 2026 with a domestic Biman flight, and CAAB documents put the terminal at nearly 99 per cent complete and the runway project at about 92 per cent, both running to December 2026. In late October 2026, CAAB proposed inaugurating the airport as an international facility on 10 November 2026, with Biman's Dhaka–Muscat flight — a Boeing 777 service — stopping at Cox's Bazar as the first international operation; Biman had completed its formalities and received Oman's permission, though the date still awaited the prime minister's final approval. Whether international services become regular will depend on the same arithmetic that undid the 2025 declaration: airlines fly where passengers are, and Cox's Bazar's passengers are still mostly Bangladeshis arriving by road and domestic flight.

A district carrying more than tourism

Any account of Cox's Bazar that ends at the beach misses the district's other reality. In 2017, violence in Myanmar's Rakhine State drove a mass exodus of Rohingya people across the border into this district, and Cox's Bazar has hosted them since. The joint Government of Bangladesh–UNHCR registration counted 1,206,528 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh as of 30 September 2026, of whom 1,173,291 were living in the camps and settlements of Cox's Bazar district — a refugee population several times the size of the district town itself, concentrated in Ukhia and Teknaf, along the same southern corridor as the Marine Drive. (The crisis, its aid architecture and its unresolved politics are the subject of a separate Wiki Bangla article.) There is a bleak historical symmetry in it: a town that began in 1799 as one officer's attempt to settle Arakanese refugees is, more than two centuries later, the site of the largest refugee settlement in the world, drawn from the same coast across the border.

Cox's Bazar, then, is several places at once: Asia's longest beach and a promotional superlative that does not quite survive scrutiny; a fishing and shutki coast of real economic weight; a domestic tourism machine of half a thousand hotels pressing hard on a few kilometres of eroding sand; a corridor of new infrastructure — marine drive, reclaimed runway — built to carry that machine further; and a district whose name is known worldwide for a refugee crisis that has nothing to do with holidays. The sand connects all of it, and the sand is the part that is washing away.