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Blue Water Hotels – Especially For Open Water Swimmers

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This is a dream come true: a global hotel listing made by passionate open water swimmers for passionate open water swimmers.

Mauricio Prieto and his wife Susan Moody Prieto created Blue Water Hotels, a curated guide to hotels with direct access to the open water for swimming.

The guide lists 54 hotels in Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Greece, Norway, Switzerland, Jamaica, the United States and Mexico that strictly meet four criteria for inclusion:

  • direct access to open water or under five minutes on foot
  • a real unobstructed swim route
  • good water quality
  • a hotel worth staying at regardless of the swim

Prieto explains how he and his wife decided upon the four standards for Blue Water Hotels, “The starting point was simple.  Not all beachfront is made for swimmers. Plenty of hotels sit on the water and are no use at all if what you want is a swim.

But every so often you get both, a great hotel and a great swim, and for Susan and me that’s what makes a trip. In the past few months we’ve had a good run. We went to Dubrovnik for a wedding and stayed at the Excelsior, where a broad stone terrace sits right at sea level, tables laid for dinner along one side and the other edge dropping straight into the water. You jump in, and there are short ladders to climb back up.

Les Roches at Le Lavandou, where the rooms stair-step down to the rocks. Villa Salvador in Cadaqués, where you swim off the beach and thirty seconds later you’re over coves and rocky coast.

So we decided to stop relying on luck and put together the list we wanted: hotels that give you both: Blue Water Hotels (bluewaterhotels.com).  The four rules are simply what those 54 hotels have in common.

  • Direct access to open water, or under five minutes on foot. Hotels describe themselves as beachfront and mean something else: a shuttle, a road crossing, fifteen minutes with your towel. We stopped believing the word and started measuring the walk.
  • A real, unobstructed swim route. Then there is the opposite problem. There’s a hotel we loved on Cap d’Antibes, sitting right on a beach and between two marinas, where the swimming area in front is small. We had memorable swims on that cape, just not from there. Access isn’t the same as a swim. This rule is about what happens once you’re in.
  • Water worth swimming in. This took us longest to get right. We first wrote it as water quality and clarity, then realized we’d written a rule that excluded most of the water we love. Nobody swims Aquatic Park in San Francisco for the visibility. Sometimes worth swimming in means seeing the bottom ten metres down. Sometimes it means cold and dark and the kind of water people get addicted to. What it never means is water you’d rather not be in.
  • A hotel worth staying at, water aside. This is Susan’s rule, and it keeps the list honest. There are places with superb swimming we wouldn’t go back to. If the only reason to be there is the water, it isn’t a hotel recommendation, it’s a beach recommendation.

That split is how we work. I judge the access, the route, the water. Susan judges the stay. Both of us swim everything we list, and a hotel goes on only when we both say yes.

There’s a fifth thing that isn’t a rule, but it takes as much of our time: the photographs. Hotel photography is made to sell rooms, so its suites and breakfast and a pool at dusk, and the sea is a blue strip behind somebody’s shoulder. That tells a swimmer nothing. We go back to hotels asking specifically for the pictures nobody puts in a brochure: the steps down to the water, the ladder off the rocks, the aerial that shows how far the door really is from the sea. When a hotel sends us someone actually getting in, that’s the shot we lead with. A swimmer decides with their eyes, and they’re looking at something different from everyone else.

The other decision was to make it binary. No stars, no scores, no rankings. A hotel is on or it isn’t, and if it’s on, it passed all four. That means leaving off places we like, which is uncomfortable and is also the point. A list that includes everything isn’t a list.

Very importantly, hotels cannot pay to be listed, and a number of the listings were submitted by open water swimmers to come up with an outstanding list.“

The guide currently list 54 hotels, most are on the Mediterranean Sea, although the list also includes cold water listings on the Norwegian coast and in Puget Sound in Washington, and a freshwater listing on Lake Zurich. Alongside the hotel listings, the site publishes longer guides, including a history of the Marnaton open water swimming circuit in Spain.

A number of listings were submitted by open water swimmers rather than found by the editors, and contributors are credited on the pages they recommended. Contributors include Antonio Argüelles, who recommended the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club in San Diego, and members of the Dolphin Club in San Francisco, California.

Blue Water Hotels

© 2026 Daily News of Open Water Swimming

“to educate, enthuse, and entertain all those who venture beyond the shoreline“

World Open Water Swimming Federation, an exclusively human-powered project.

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