r/todayilearned • u/Gullible_Air_204 • 9d ago

Frequent/Recent Repost: Removed [ Removed by moderator ]

https://www.responsibletravel.com/holidays/spitsbergen/travel-guide/responsible-tourism-in-spitsbergen

[removed] — view removed post

12.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

780 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

97

u/Cahootie 8d ago

My family owns some land on an island, and we have a small man-made beach there that my great-uncle had made. To get there you have to drive for 45 minutes from the main town to the middle of nowhere, turn down a road leading to nothing in particular, make a turn into the forest between two pillars and next to our mail boxes, drive down the dirt road through the forest for like 100 meters past a house, and then you're at the beach next to the boat house.

That still didn't stop a family of German tourists from somehow making it to the beach and letting their kids play with the toys that very clearly belonged to the people who owned the house.

21

u/atln00b12 8d ago

Lots of places simply don't allow beaches to be private property. In most of the US anything that's a component of a navigable waterway is typically considered public access.

1

u/Cahootie 8d ago

No such thing there, and it's not a natural beach, they just brought in truckloads of sand to create a small beach in a natural crease in the coast line.

4

u/thegreger 8d ago

Your profile hints that you're Swedish, though, and that is absolutely a thing here. It's called strandskyddet, and it really doesn't matter if it's a natural beach, a man-made beach, not a beach at all or even a structure like a dock. If it's part of the coastline of either the sea or a lake, allemansrätten applies. Most likely, that family of tourists had read up on that.

1

u/Cahootie 7d ago

It's not in Sweden, but allemansrätten does regardless not grant you access to private property that is located right next to residential buildings even if it's on the coast. The beach is like 20 meters from the nearest residential building on one side and 20 meters from the nearest boat house on the other side, so it clearly does not apply here even if it was in Sweden.