Three Great Malibu Beaches

Windward Beach at Point Dume

Less than a mile north of Kanan Dume Road (also known as Latigo Canyon), you’ll find three great Malibu beaches in a row.

Point Dume is a right turn (counter-intuitive, since the beach is on your left) off PCH onto Westward Beach Road. The Point’s Westward Beach (pictured here on a Wednesday at 2pm), always appears shrouded in a mist of marine layer.

While you can’t always find beach-adjacent parking, you can find great morning tide pooling, a 4-mile hike (the trailhead is at the end of the road) and regular dolphin sightings. This is also known as a great spot for whale-watching between December and April.

At the corner of Westward Beach and PCH, perched high on a hill above two beaches, you could park yourself on a window-seat cushion at The Sunset Restaurant and take in the snuggle-worthy view. They serve brunch, dinner and drinks, and are open on weekends from 11am-10pm.

(Zuma Beach, just beyond Point Dume, is a soft, pretty stretch of white sand with lots of facilities…and is always very crowded on a sunny weekend day. So crowded, in fact, that I generally skip it in favor of a quick detour into the neighborhood across PCH from Zuma to see great houses, peaceful ocean views, and even a rose-filled paddock with a couple of furry miniature horses.)

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Broad Beach from PCH

Broad Beach – left at the first stoplight after Zuma — has the truly prime real estate. A stunning, mostly private stretch of mostly soft but sometimes rocky sand and seaweed-rich surf, with mansions of every imaginable style grandly set back from the shoreline, this is our favorite beach for looking around and asking each other:

“How could we make this a lifestyle choice?”

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Broad Beach from the sand

There are two public entrances from the one street into this neighborhood, both little more than breaks in tall chain-link fences, each marked by small, unobtrusive white signs. The implied message is that the people who live here are legally required to provide local access to what amounts to their front yards, but they don’t have to advertise. Go forth boldly, though, and enjoy the beach life of the truly wealthy – for free.

Broad Beach has the special distinction of being the only place we always see dolphins, every single visit. But there is one major drawback — no bathroom, unless you happen to know someone who lives out there. The closest (single) bathroom is back out at PCH, at the Starbucks in the Westward Ho Market corner mall.

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El Matador Beach

Next in line is my favorite Malibu beach – El Matador. While only 1/4 mile up from Broad Beach on PCH, the entire landscape here is different: tall jutting cliffs fence in this intimate cove, and small rock arches and caves rise out of the shoreline. From a $2-a-car parking lot with bathrooms, the beach, fully hidden from the road, is reached by descending a steep staircase.

Watch cormorants and pelicans soar overhead, or sea lions frolic on the crusty wave-lapped rocks just offshore. There’s a always at least a few people here, but never enough to make you regret the drive. It’s a little slice of vacation, a half-hour from Santa Monica.

(By the way, for those up on their 80s trivia, you might recognize El Matador as the site of Madonna’s mer-man video for “Cherish.” Or…not.)

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