Nissi Beach in Ayia Napa named Cyprus’s most Instagrammable and 11th in the world — STUDY

Nissi Beach in Ayia Napa has been recognised as Cyprus’s most “Instagrammable” beach and ranked 11th in a global ranking of 98 beaches. The findings come from a study by New Zealand company Hot Spring Spas NZ, which compared how actively tourists photograph the world’s famous beaches for Instagram.

The authors counted not the total number of posts, but their density — the number of posts per metre of coastline. Beach lengths were taken from the open mapping database OpenStreetMap, while publication data was collected on 5 August. More than 160 well-known beaches were considered in total, but only those with at least 50,000 posts made it into the final ranking — 98 beaches in all.

Nissi, which is 675 metres long, had 258,371 posts, or 383 posts for every metre of coastline. The second Cypriot beach on the list, Fig Tree Bay in Protaras, ranked 60th, with a length of 818 metres, 59,696 posts and 73 posts per metre.

Among the 36 countries included, Cyprus ranked eighth: countries were ranked according to the result of their best-performing beach. First place in the world went to Bondi Beach in Australia, which had more than 2 million posts, followed by Venice Beach in the US and Coogee Beach in Australia. Padang Padang in Indonesia and Waikiki in the US also made the top 10.

According to Hot Spring Spas NZ CEO Aaron Sampson, beaches that are easy to reach and offer a recognisable view for the camera tend to rank higher.