A long, lazy lunch at a great little beach bar: fresh local cooking, thirst-slaking wine in a chill-beaded bucket, and all the pleasure of the setting without the sandy bum and the sweat. Simple or smart, early or late — from the Côte d’Azur to Croatia, here are our European favourites.

MYKONOS, GREECE
Panormos Beach Bar 00 30 22890 27640

The chichi Cycladic island has a split personality. One half is dolled up in stretchy Dolce & Gabbana summerwear, doing disco cocktails nightly. The other is remote, carefree, altogether rather hippie. That’s the spirit at Panormos Beach Bar, in the island’s breezy north, where teak-tanned twentysomethings punch volleyballs on an unmanicured curve of bleached beach. Stylistically, it’s 1970s Goa, roofed with desert-camouflage net, inviting you to lie on Indian cushions and rake the beach floor with your toes. Yet the soundtrack is sumptuous new house, which works with the wine to distract you until the sky deepens with the end of the day.

LIGURIA, ITALY
Da Giovanni 00 39 0185 770047

Painted butterscotch and saffron, Portofino is the bijou Mediterranean harbour of Hollywood fantasy. But the cinematic looks, the diminutive proportions and the clatter of Ferragamo slingbacks on cobbles can occasionally overwhelm. Which is why God created San Fruttuoso — a thumbnail cove of pebbles shelving to jade waters just along the coast. A Benedictine abbey dwarfs it, cliffs cradle it, and no roads will get you there, only a ferry (or your hiking feet). At the Formica-simple Da Giovanni, annexed to the abbey, you can eat sensational pesto lasagne, eased down with jug after jug of gluggable white. In an hour, you’ll swear that’s the young Sophia Loren in the black one-piece, breaststroking out into the waves.

ST TROPEZ, FRANCE
La Voile Rouge 00 33 4 94 79 84 34

A fine spray regularly envelops dancers on the tabletops at the Côte d’Azur’s most celebrated beach-bar-bash. That spray comes not from the surf of Pampelonne Bay, but from well-aimed Dom Pérignon, at about £650 a bottle: rattled to a froth until corks pop, the foaming champagne flies. Playboys of near-Austin Powers pretension arrive from ships offshore, with girlfriends willowy or pneumatic. Spare tables are rare; silicone, apparently, is not. And by mid-afternoon a catwalk fashion show may be in flow, bringing more bikini’d clients in from the beach. It’s not unknown for a model to step out of a little number she’s parading, sell it to an interested onlooker and totter off in her heels, starkers.

WATERGATE BAY, UK
The Beach Hut 01637 860840

The pukka persona of Jamie Oliver is alive and well down on this dramatic Cornish stretch. Pitched a few steps above a wide view of rollers, the Beach Hut embraces classic masculinity (a steady influx of muscular surfers) and contemporary cooking (baked cannelloni stuffed with goat’s cheese, spinach and sun-blushed tomatoes). This is probably the most understatedly fashionable seafront hang-out in Cornwall — for cold beers at outside tables in summer, or hot chocolate when the February afternoon is black by 4pm and a storm is brewing. Perfection is a clear late-spring day out on the deck, with the warm promise of summer, the Atlantic coming in and mussels in white wine on their way.

FORMENTERA, BALEARICS
Las Banderas 00 34 666 559027

At some point, even the most wide-eyed partygoer on Ibiza needs to take a chill pill. That pill comes in the shape of a tiny island three miles off the coast of its clubby big sister. Formentera can be yours in about 30 minutes by ferry. Settle down at Las Banderas and the tinnitus of club speakers in your ears slowly fades, aided by a bottle of chilled white Rioja. It’s a bohemian beach bar/B&B, a few stumbles from the Caribbean-clean sands of Mitjorn beach. Garlicky sardines slip down with the wine. Dolly-mixture-coloured walls seem like gentle flashbacks to the party the night before. And old-looking glasses conspire with flickery Marrakesh lanterns to evoke a Notting-Hill-but-nicer mood. By the way, you can stay. Book one of the coveted four bedrooms — but make it fashionably early.

ESTORIL, PORTUGAL
Tamariz Bar 00 351 214 683512

This is summer’s hot ticket for boy and girl beach babes from Lisbon. It shifts easily from fruit-smoothie pit stop by day to club by night. Twelve miles or so from the capital by cab (about £20), Estoril appeals to well-heeled Europeans, as it has since the 19th century, when it was a warm winter refuge of grand mansions. Tamariz Bar still carries the glamour torch. Occasionally, it’s a bit poncey — a bit “VIP” — but usually it’s a fab bash for all who show. Last year’s July beach party drew vast crowds of visitors and residents: eventually, they spilt beyond club to shore, or hogged the squashy beanbags out on the decking, getting slurry on mojitos until the sun came up.

TARIFA, SPAIN
Rancho de Valdevaqueros 00 34 956 684919

This part of Andalusia, near Cadiz, is better known as Surfer Central, southern Spain. Hurricane Hotel is the famous hostel, but Valdevaqueros — its smaller, simpler sister, four miles to the west — is more laid-back. This is the Spanish coast at its rawest, remotest best (North Africa lies cloud-shrouded across the sea), and days can be gusty and brisk. But that’s what’s needed to fill the sails of the kitesurfers. After half a day in the surf, they’re ready for a carb fix of hamburgers at Valdevaqueros; then an idle afternoon, surrounded by subtly Moorish furnishings, with Arabic and flamenco sounds pulsing through the speakers till the caipirinhas and the stars come out.

BASKA, CROATIA
Blue Bar

Although EasyJet flies into its airport, Krk island feels undiscovered: lying long and mountainous in the Kvarner Gulf, it’s pleasingly marooned in a time warp of abandoned stone chapels, paths through pine woods and fields of herbs. Even in summer, it doesn’t feel overrun — the pebble beach at Baska is one of the longest in the country. One of Croatia’s best white wines, Zlahtina, is made on Krk, and little beats sipping it at Blue Bar, with the surf practically tickling your toes. Apart from the backdrop of mountain peaks, this place is not about grand gestures. It’s a bamboo shack with simple wicker seating, the low buzz of chitchat, a flicker of candles at sunset and that cold white slipping down for about a pound a glass.

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