On Bangladesh's southern coast, Kuakata is one of the few beaches in the world where the sun both rises and sets over the same sea. Behind its 18 kilometres of sand stands an older story — Rakhine settlers who crossed from Arakan in 1784, dug the wells that named the place, and built its Buddhist temples — and a modern one, of tourism growth on a shoreline being steadily cut away by erosion.
Most sea beaches face one way. Kuakata, on the southern coast of Bangladesh in Patuakhali's Kalapara Upazila, faces the open Bay of Bengal so squarely that the day can be bookended by the same sea: the sun climbs out of the water in the morning and sinks back into it in the evening, both visible from one long stretch of sand. That double spectacle has made this small town, about 320 kilometres south of Dhaka, one of Bangladesh's best-loved coastal destinations — and earned it the name Sagar Kannya, the "Daughter of the Sea".
But the beach is only the surface of Kuakata. Behind the sand lies a settlement story more than two centuries old: an Indigenous Buddhist people, the Rakhines, who crossed the sea from Arakan, dug wells on a waterless shore and gave the place its name. Their temples, villages and forests still shape Kuakata — even as erosion eats at the coastline and the community itself has dwindled to a fraction of what it was.
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Kuakata's beach is a broad, gently shelving expanse of sand that the Bangladesh Tourism Board measures at roughly 18 kilometres long and 3 kilometres wide at low tide. Unlike Cox's Bazar, its more famous counterpart in the south-east, Kuakata has no headland interrupting the shore: the land simply flattens out into the Bay of Bengal, with the Andharmanik and Agunmukha river mouths to either side. The water is comparatively calm, the slope gradual, and the sand firm enough that the beach doubles as the town's highway for motorbikes and vans at low tide.
The famous sunrise and sunset depend on this geography. Because the beach faces due south onto open sea, there is water on the horizon both to the east and to the west. Visitors gather before dawn at the eastern end of the beach, towards Gangamati, to watch the sun rise directly out of the Bay; in the evening the crowd drifts west, where the same sun sets into the sea. Very few beaches anywhere offer both events over the ocean from a single shoreline, and it is this — more than any facility — that defines Kuakata.
The town that serves the beach is modest: a strip of hotels and restaurants around the main beach point, known locally as Zero Point, a municipality, markets, and the working harbours of Alipur and Mohipur a few kilometres north. Kuakata was formally declared a tourist spot in 1998, and although a master plan for its development was approved by the Prime Minister's Office in 2013, its implementation has been slow and contested. What visitors find today is still closer to a fishing town with a beach than a planned resort.
The accepted account of the name is preserved in the landscape itself. "Kuakata" comes from kua, the Bengali word for a well. When the first Rakhine settlers landed on this coast in the late eighteenth century, they found a shoreline where fresh water was the scarcest resource: the sea was everywhere, but the groundwater near the surface was brackish. Their answer was to dig — deep wells on the shore and inside their homesteads, a laborious technique they made the foundation of settlement.
The wells came first, and the village followed. The settlement that grew up around the digging became known, in Bengali, as the place of the dug well: Kuakata. Well-digging inside homesteads became a lasting Rakhine tradition, practised into the present day, and the most famous of the old wells still stands at Keranipara, at the edge of the beach, in front of the community's ancient Buddhist vihara. By one detailed local account, the naming well was dug beside the meditating Buddha image of the Srimangal Buddha Bihar when the temple was founded around 1782–84. Some Rakhine accounts add that the locality had an older name, Gadla, before "Kuakata" prevailed — but it is the well, and the thirst that dug it, that the name remembers.
The Rakhines of Kuakata are an ethnic Buddhist people whose homeland is Arakan, in present-day Myanmar. Community historians date their arrival to 1784, when the Burmese Konbaung kingdom conquered Arakan and families took to the sea to escape. Around 150 families are said to have crossed in some fifty sailing boats, landing first at Rangabali and then spreading along the Patuakhali and Barguna coasts. (Some older tourism texts blame the expulsion on the Mughals; the chronology points instead to the Burmese conquest of 1784.)
When they arrived, this coast was forest — an extension of the greater Sundarbans. The Rakhines cleared it, dug their wells and became the region's first settled agriculturalists, organising themselves into villages called para, each built around a pagoda-roofed Buddhist temple. Their language, dress, weaving and food remained distinctly their own, and Kuakata is still a place of pilgrimage: at the festivals of Rash Purnima and Maghi Purnima, Hindu and Buddhist devotees arrive in large numbers to take holy baths in the Bay.
The temples are the community's archive in brick and bronze. At Keranipara, the village that begins right by the beach, the ancient Seema Buddhist Vihara guards a meditating Buddha cast in ashtadhatu, an alloy of eight metals, traditionally said to weigh about thirty-seven maunds; a century-old temple nearby holds a statue of Gautama Buddha and two wells reckoned to be 200 years old. A few kilometres east, the Misripara Seema Buddha Bihar — described by The Daily Star as the largest Buddhist temple in Bangladesh — houses a Buddha image that local tradition claims is among the largest in the subcontinent; the temple, damaged by Cyclones Sidr and Aila, became a symbol of the community's determination to hold on to its heritage. The Srimangal Buddha Bihar at Kalapara is older still, said to be 240 years old, though its 2.44 acres have been fought over in a land dispute that reached the High Court, which in 2016 ordered that no development take place on the land.
That dispute points to the harder truth of the Rakhine story today. A house-to-house census in 2014 counted just 2,425 Rakhines in Patuakhali and Barguna, in 44 surviving villages — community leaders say the population once exceeded 50,000, spread across more than two hundred villages. Floods that destroyed land deeds (notably in 1965), cyclones, forged documents and outright land grabbing have stripped families of their farms; Caritas, which works with the community, estimates that 90 to 95 per cent of Rakhines have lost land. New pressures keep coming: one village, Chayanipara, was erased entirely by the construction of Payra Port, its last families departing in November 2024. The Rakhine Cultural Academy built to preserve their music and weaving stands locked and dusty. In recent years the sea has also surrendered a reminder of who these people were: a centuries-old Rakhine schooner, the Shonar Nouka — the "Golden Boat" — unearthed from the sands of Kuakata where erosion had buried it.
At the eastern end of the beach, where the sunrise crowds gather, the sand gives way to the Gangamati Reserved Forest — a belt of evergreen mangrove along the Gangamati canal. Gangamati matters out of proportion to its size: it is a surviving fragment of the original forest that covered this entire coast when the Rakhines landed, a piece of the old Sundarbans fringe with its tangle of mangrove roots, canals and birdlife. Across the water to the west, the mangroves of Fatrar Char, inside the Tengragiri Wildlife Sanctuary, are promoted locally as a "second Sundarbans".
The area's protected status is modern but fragile. The Coastal Forest Department created the Kuakata Eco Park in 2005–06, planting tens of thousands of trees across the Gangamati–Khajura–Latachapli–Fatrar Char belt; Cyclone Sidr flattened much of it in November 2007, and renovation proposals have repeatedly stalled. In October 2010 the government declared Kuakata National Park, protecting 1,613 hectares of the coastal forest and wetland as an IUCN Category II park and a safe zone for vultures. Yet a Financial Express assessment in December 2025 reported that nearly two-thirds of the park's forest land has already been lost, with officials estimating some 75,000 trees a year destroyed by erosion and tidal action — leaving the park, in the words of local residents, existing mostly on paper.
Tourism is Kuakata's newest economy, not its oldest. A few kilometres north of the beach, Alipur–Mohipur is one of the largest fish landing and trading centres in southern Bangladesh, where deep-sea boats unload hilsa and other Bay of Bengal catch to be iced, auctioned and trucked across the country. The fishing calendar shapes the town as much as the holiday calendar does.
Its most distinctive industry appears each winter at Lembur Char, where the shutki — dried fish — season runs from November to April. On hundreds of bamboo racks spread across the coastal belt, thousands of villagers clean, split and sun-dry the catch exactly as it has been done for generations, without chemicals. Local traders put annual production at around 5,000 tonnes, and the Kalapara fisheries office set the same figure as its production target for the 2025–26 season; by trader estimates, close to 10,000 people in the surrounding villages earn something from the trade. The best grades — dried shrimp, loitta, lakha — command high prices in Chittagong and Dhaka markets and in the shutki shops that line the beach road for tourists.
Kuakata's rise as a destination has been real but uneven. Declared a tourist spot in 1998 and covered by a master plan since 2013, the town has added hotels, a marine drive and embankment works, including a World Bank–assisted repair and beautification of some 39 kilometres of coastal polder. Visitor numbers have grown with better roads, and the Tourism Board itself has acknowledged that the beach needs planned development and beautification if it is to hold its visitors.
Against that stands the sea. A study published in Frontiers in Marine Science in 2024 calculated that between 1989 and 2020 Kuakata's coastline retreated by an average of 0.32 square kilometres a year — 13.59 square kilometres of land lost, against 3.27 gained. Local accounts date the sharp acceleration to Cyclone Sidr in 2007; since then, by bdnews24's reporting, more than 2,000 acres have gone, including 400 acres of the casuarina forest planted to shield the shore. The pattern is visible at Zero Point, where geo-bags laid against the waves are gapped and undermined, and each monsoon the sea tears at the beach again — in July 2026, erosion was threatening the tourist police box, mosques, temples and the marine drive itself. A permanent fix has been discussed for two decades. The Water Development Board submitted a Tk 759 crore project in 2024 to protect an 11.7-kilometre stretch of the beach; as of 2026 it was still awaiting approval, leaving geo-tubes and emergency works as the only defence. The paradox of modern Kuakata is that the shoreline is doing two things at once — accreting new sand towards the east, where the beach has extended to some 29 kilometres, while its width, its forests and its protective tree line are steadily being cut away.
Kuakata today is several places at once. It is a working fishing coast, where the shutki racks fill each winter and the boats of Alipur–Mohipur work the Bay. It is a pilgrimage shore for two religions, and the fragile homeland of one of Bangladesh's smallest Indigenous communities, whose temples, wells and burial grounds carry a history that began with a flight across the sea in 1784. And it is a resort in the making — loved for the rarest of beach pleasures, a sunrise and a sunset over the same water, yet visibly fraying at its edges.
Which of these Kuakatas prevails will depend on decisions now pending: whether the long-awaited beach protection project is finally approved and built, whether the National Park's remaining mangroves can be held, and whether the Rakhine villages that gave the town its name survive the pressures of land and sea. The Daughter of the Sea has been remade by the water before — the wells, the temples and the forest are all answers to it. The question of the coming decade is whether Bangladesh answers in kind.
