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Where on Earth?
This is the view from a mystery shore - each colour is the country across the water on that bearing (hover or tap the wedges). Click the globe to guess where it is. Six guesses; within 100 km wins.
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Mode
Coast
Anywhere
Over land
Point your phone at the sea
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Most countries in sea view - Penrhyn, Cook Islands (58)
Longest sea voyage - Pakistan → Kamchatka, 32,098 km
Widest sea view - Svalbard, 340.9° of water
Cape Adare, Antarctica - 330° of water
Furthest by sea - Hudson Strait, Canada (Australia, 24,010 km)
Most countries from land - near João Pessoa, Brazil (70)
Most countries over land only - Yushu, China (18)
Dakhla peninsula, Western Sahara
Trinidad, east coast
Falkland Islands
Land’s End, England → Brazil
Perth, Australia → Africa
New York, Rockaway Beach
Cape Point, South Africa
Lisbon, Portugal
Tokyo Bay, Japan
Wellington, New Zealand
Tristan da Cunha, South Atlantic
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Nothing picked yet. Click the globe - a coastline in Coast mode, any point on land or sea in Anywhere or Over land - or try one of the places under it.
Clockwise from north Mode
Coast
Anywhere
Over land
Detail
0.25°
0.1°
Map
Political
Terrain
Satellite
Three modes. Coast snaps your pick to the water's edge and follows each direction across the sea to its first landfall; land within about 20 km in a direction counts as "land in view" and is left blank. Anywhere starts from the exact point you tapped, on land or at sea, and follows each direction to the first land that is not the country you are standing in - so from Berlin, east is Poland at 80 km. Over land does the same but never crosses water: a direction that reaches the sea first is left blank.
Not 100% accurate, by nature. The analysis grid is roughly 10 km, and that cuts both ways. Islands smaller than a grid cell are kept deliberately as a single cell so they still count (Tristan da Cunha, Bermuda, the Maldives) - but that draws them as a square, and an island closer than about 10 km to a coast merges with it, so in Over land mode Kinmen reads as joined to mainland China and Taiwan appears reachable over land. In the other direction, straits and inlets narrower than about 10 km can vanish, and the exact point you "stand" on is snapped to the grid. Directions are sampled every quarter of a degree - a spread of about 22 km at 5,000 km and 65 km at 15,000 km, so a distant island narrower than that can slip between two bearings. The Detail selector's 0.1° setting narrows that to about 9 km and 26 km, at roughly 2.5× the compute per pick.
There is also no such thing as the coastline. This is the coastline paradox : the finer you measure a coast, the longer it gets, without limit - every bay contains smaller bays. So any answer depends on the map's level of detail. Here it is Natural Earth's 1:10m outlines (public domain), which is generous for a globe and coarse for a beach.
Free, open source (MIT), nothing tracked. Questions or corrections: adam@nearest.land
Like this? Also see orrery.live for a 3D tour of the solar system.
Built with three.js (MIT) and topojson-client (ISC). Country outlines and the Terrain map: Natural Earth (public domain), outlines via world-atlas (ISC). Satellite map: NASA Blue Marble (public domain). Code: MIT licence .