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Icing-sugar sand, 3km of it, crystal-clear Caribbean water, off-shore coral reef with spectacular snorkelling or diving, a smattering of bars and open-air restaurants ... job done!

There is no shortage of beautiful beaches on the smallest of the Balearics but everybody seems to want to cram on to Illetes and Espalmador. Much better to hire a bike or moped in the main port, La Savina, and head a few kilometres across the island to Cala Saona.

A beach made from years of dumped litter sounds like a hellhole but, at Glass beach, on the Mendocino coast in California, the result is quite beautiful. From 1906 to 1967, glass, appliances and even vehicles were chucked into the sea.

Panama has three archipelagos: San Blas is pricey to get to, the Pearl Islands are pricey to stay on, but Bocas del Toro, just south of Costa Rica on the Caribbean side, puts virgin beach utopia within a backpacker budget.

More of a cove than a beach, backed by cliffs and dense woods, with white sands and pebbles and clear blue waters – is Fakistra on the Pelion peninsula (mainland Greece), below Tsagarada village.

Sugar sand, palms, breeze, sea that’s 26-29C year round and the colour of peppermint mouthwash... Bora Bora is a cliched vision of the heavenly beach. Even if you never get to go, this is one for the mental image bank at least – use it when meditating. Matira has to win as the only public beach on the island, and somewhere you could mingle with locals.

A three-hour drive from Sydney, Greenfield beach sits next to Jervis Bay’s calm waters and blindingly white sand. It is about 500m north of the more famous Hyams beach, so crowds tend to gravitate away from it and framed by a dense forest of gum trees and a small sandstone cliff.

As if a beach like this needed any enhancement, pink-hued sand ups the ante in the picture-postcard stakes at Source d’Argent, a secluded cove on La Digue, the Seychelles’ third-largest island (in an archipelago of 115).

It’s not difficult to find a stunning beach on Sardinia, but finding one that caters for families on a modest budget is more of a challenge. Cala Gonone ticks all of the right boxes. White pebble-and-sand beaches, with sun loungers and parasols for rent, calm, turquoise waters for swimming and snorkelling, a long seafront promenade lined with low-key trattorias – and none of the bling that accompanies the glitzier Costa Smeralda to the north.

In the far west of the Algarve, the fishing village of Salema has somehow escaped the large-scale development that blights much of Portugal’s southern coast. Fishermen tend their nets on the sandy Blue Flag-certified beach, and dinosaur footprints can be found preserved in the limestone rocks.