La Concha and El Prado in world top 10 beaches and museums lists

A BEACH in the Basque Country has been voted the sixth-best in the world, beating others in the Seychelles, Sydney and Cape Verde, whilst Madrid's El Prado art museum has squeezed into the global top 10, according to the latest TripAdvisor Travellers' Choice Awards.

San Sebastián's La Concha beach (first picture) – so-called because of its shell (concha, in Spanish) shape had some tough competition in a list topped by Grace Bay in Providenciales, in the idyllic Caribbean island nation of Turks & Caicos, followed by the Bahia do Sancho in Fernando de Noronha in north-eastern Brazil, Varadero beach in Cuba, Eagle beach in Aruba and Seven Mile beach in Grand Cayman.

In fact, the top 10 is dominated by beaches in the Caribbean, with Seven Mile beach in Jamaica eighth, Bávaro beach in the Dominican Republic ninth and the north beach in México's Las Mujeres Islands 10^th – the only one outside of this area, aside from Bahia do Sancho and La Concha, is Clearwater beach in Florida, USA.

Lower down the list and in descending order are the beach in Elafonissi, Greece; Falesia beach in Olhos de Agua, Portugal; Fig Tree Bay in Protaras, Cyprus; Bournemouth in the UK; Anse Lazio beach on Praslin Island in the Seychelles; Manly beach, across the harbour from Sydney, Australia; Santa Mônica, in Cape Verde; Agonda, in India; Kleopatra beach in Alanya, Turkey; Galápagos beach in Tortuga Bay in the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador; La Spiaggia dei Conigli ('Rabbits' Beach') in Lampedusa, Italy; Sharm El-Luli in Marsa Alam, Egypt; Nungwi in Tanzania; Punta Uva in Costa Rica, and finally at number 25, White beach in Boracay, Malaysia.

Back indoors and onto culture, history and heritage rather than sunshine and waves, Madrid's 'big three' give tourists plenty of art to choose from on a break in the Spanish capital and, although the Thyssen-Bornemizsa and Reina Sofía are highly-acclaimed and world-famous – the latter houses Pablo Picasso's Guernika and Salvador Dalí's melting clocks – it is the El Prado (second picture) which has captured holidaymakers' hearts.

At number nine in the world, it beats London's V&A, or Victoria & Albert, and National Gallery (10^th and 11^th), Stockholm's Vasa Museum (12^th), Paris' iconic Louvre (13^th), the Egyptian Museum in Torino, Italy (14^th) and Amsterdam's famous Rijksmuseum (15^th).

In a list headed up by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MOMA) in New York, New Orleans' National World War II Museum (both in the USA) and Paris' Musée d'Orsay, El Prado's ninth place is a very creditable result.

It is also beaten by two others in the USA - The Art Institute of Chicago (fourth) and the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York (sixth) – plus the fifth-placed State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, the seventh-placed National Anthropology Museum in México DF and, only just, by the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece, which is number eight.

Very few countries have more than one museum in the top 25 – they include Italy, whose Uffizi Galleries in Florence come in 16^th; The Netherlands, whose Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam comes 17^th; Brazil, which enters in 18^th place for the Ricardo Brennand Institute in Recife on the north coast and 20^th for the State Pinacoteca in São Paulo, plus France and the USA.

Other museums which, like the El Prado, are the sole entries for their countries are the Te Papa Tongarewa or Museum of New Zealand in Wellington (19^th); the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City – formerly Saigon – in Vietnam (21^st); the Larco Museum in Lima, Perú (22^nd); the Gold Museum in Bogotá, Colombia (23rd); the Terracotta Army museum in Xian, China (24^th), and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh.