Legal · liveTVEAAPNC
Cantarriján’s beach bars stopped serving nudists — and national TV came to watch
The year’s defining Spanish naturist story, and it is not about a beach at all: it is about the two chiringuitos on it. In March the association warned that tradition was turning into prohibition. In April the La Barraca restaurant withdrew the clothing-optional zone it had conceded after long negotiation, calling it “not profitable” and short of staff. By late July, TVE’s Directo Al Grano was on the sand filming the row, and the owner of La Bola Marina explained on camera that his bar was not equipped for the “hygiene” of nude customers.
Nudists NEVER sit on a chair or a cushion without first putting down a pareo or a towel. It is not a courtesy to other people’s hygiene — it is protection for our own.
— AAPNC’s reply to the broadcast
The association’s verdict on the coverage is the sharpest line in it: hearing the arguments said out loud converted people who had thought the ban reasonable. Underneath sits the structural problem — Cantarriján has no formal legal naturist status, only six decades of custom.
Campaign · running nowCCNLloret Gaceta
Catalonia answers massification with human chains — a hundred people at Sa Boadella
The Club Català de Naturisme has spent the summer physically re-occupying beaches whose naturist character is being eroded by textile crowds. Mar Bella on 19 July, Sa Boadella on 2 August with about a hundred participants, and Platja del Coco in Badalona on 16 August — each one a midday chain along the shoreline behind the club’s banner, each ending in a shared vermut. The Sa Boadella post is the single most-engaged item in this entire archive at 1,768 likes.
When we organise ourselves, naturism becomes visible.
— CCN, after Sa Boadella
Lloret Gaceta gave the chain a full article, and the club used it to put three concrete demands on the record: better signage, Sa Boadella described plainly as a naturist beach, and that identity carried into the town’s tourism promotion. Their stated worry is recruitment — massification makes it hardest for newcomers, especially young people and women, to undress at all.
Criminal enquiryFranceTVr/france ▲224
A preliminary investigation for “exhibition sexuelle” at Cap d’Agde — and a federation that has stopped defending the place
The Patrick Sébastien affair moved from scandal to procedure in March, when FranceTV reported a preliminary investigation for sexual exhibition after a scene filmed at a Cap d’Agde naturist campsite. The r/france thread ran to 79 comments. It lands in a season already carrying an entrance-barrier legal fight over a 1991 private-domain act, a drug arrest at a village club, and tourism figures down 9%.
We do not recommend going there as a family — it has become libertine nudity, not naturist. There is no place for families.
— @FedeNaturisme, the French federation’s own account, 3 Aug 2026
That is the finding this issue keeps returning to: the national federation is now, in public and on the same platform, advising families away from the village most identified with French naturism — while the village’s owner spends its 70th anniversary insisting naturism is not libertinage.
WildfireCHM · France4NaturismeICI · TVCapFerret
Gironde burned through the naturist heartland — La Jenny evacuated, CHM under black alert
The Saumos fire that began on 22 July put the world’s densest concentration of naturist camps inside an emergency. Regional radio listed La Jenny among eight evacuated holiday centres; a campsite at Lège was destroyed outright. CHM Montalivet went to VIGILANCE NOIRE, closing its nature zone and the Porte Pinède and asking guests to move cars off the forest edge. La Jenny reopened on 8 August with the line its visitors needed — “ni fumée, ni odeur de brûlé”, the village intact.
Our two villages are open and welcoming guests in completely normal conditions. No fire is affecting these areas.
— France4Naturisme on Euronat and Arnaoutchot, 30 Jul ♥626
The naturist operators handled it as a communications problem as much as a safety one — the sector’s summer income depends on people not cancelling, and three separate groups published reassurance within a week of each other.
Planning lawANVA · Salvem la Renegà
A 1982 planning code is being used to build over a Valencian nudist cove
At Platgetes de Bellver, in Oropesa del Mar, a housing project advances on a stretch of coast that is simultaneously a protected site and a beach of nudist tradition. The campaigners’ argument is documentary rather than emotional: the municipality is still working from a PGOU dated 1982, and they want current environmental law — and Europe — applied over it. A joint naturist-and-environmental human chain took the sand on 15 August.
The nudist cove at Playetes is only the tip of the iceberg of the corruption and building appetite that dominates the area.
— Salvem la Renegà
It is the clearest case in the file of the two storylines fusing: territory lost to textile crowds is one thing, territory lost to concrete is another, and here the same association is fighting both at once.
RightsFENEl Correo · El País
What the law actually says: pools cannot ban toplessness, and a Segovia village called the Guardia Civil to find out
The Spanish federation spent the summer doing legal education in public. When a woman from Bizkaia was challenged over going topless in a Segovia village pool, the mayor intervened and the Guardia Civil were called. FEN’s answer cites Ley 15/2022, article 21 on equal treatment and non-discrimination, and article 14 of the Constitution — and notes that every ombudsman consulted agrees this covers clothing, so community pools with such rules must withdraw them.
Nudism is not only liberating: it normalises bodies. Different, real bodies, of every age and every type.
— FEN, relaying El País
Set against the Cantarriján bars, this is the year’s useful contrast — where naturists have a statute to point at they are winning, and where they rely on custom alone they are losing ground.
Verify before bookingr/nudism
Nobody can confirm where — or whether — October’s Southern European Gathering happens
The Iberian calendar’s single biggest fixture cannot be verified for 2026. The dates we hold, 5–12 October at El Templo del Sol, exactly match the 2025 edition’s window — which was held at Costa Natura in Estepona. The venue advertises no 2026 events at all, and the INF blocks automated checks. We are not the only ones confused: a March thread on r/nudism is titled, verbatim, “Two different dates for Southern European Naturist Gathering 2026? Is one wrong? Or two events?”
Two different dates for Southern European Naturist Gathering 2026? Is one wrong? Or two events?
— r/nudism, 19 Mar 2026
The one 2026 gathering at that venue we could verify is an Esperanto-speaking naturist week, 12–19 September. Confirm with FEN or INF before booking anything.
Municipal winr/NudismSpain ▲27
A town hall put up a sign saying “nudist use recommended” — and it is spreading
Against the losses, one clean gain: Vilanova i la Geltrú has adopted the “Uso Nudista Recomendado” imagotipo at Platja de l’Aiguadolç, joining Vera and El Torn. It is the inverse of the Cantarriján problem — instead of custom quietly eroding, a municipality is putting the naturist character of a beach into its official signage, where it is much harder to erode.
The council joins in promoting its beach of nudist tradition by recommending against wearing a swimsuit.
— reported to r/NudismSpain
Small, cheap, and precisely what CCN is demanding for Sa Boadella — which is why it is worth watching whether Lloret follows.
Evictions · courtsEl País · Cadena SERNaturalmente Pod
A naturist campsite was bought, renamed and emptied — and residents say their contracts were torn up
El Portús, outside Cartagena, was one of Spain’s landmark naturist sites. Taiga took it over in August 2023 and declined to renew residents’ contracts; by April 2025 the local press was writing its naturist obituary, and the word Naturista had come off the name. The people fighting it are not tourists — Collin and Margaret Stewart bought in 1989 and moved permanently in 2000; the writer Eugenia Rico put €125,000 in during 2006 and registered it as her residence. Seven families were still holding out in May 2025, and one of them has written a book about the process.
It was like a concentration camp.
— a resident, on the eviction fight, to El País
The naturist podcast Naturalmente Pod takes it further, naming Colima Capital and Taiga Campings and alleging a pattern across the country — Cala del Aceite becoming Taiga Conil, Cuevas del Mar becoming Taiga Almería Playa. Its host invited the director to reply on air and pointedly refused to call for a boycott. He is not a neutral observer: he moved to Relax-Nat in Girona precisely because El Portús stopped being naturist, which is why that camp appears in this issue as a refuge.
OwnershipNaturisme Mag700 reviewsNaturalmente Pod
The same thing is happening in both countries: investment groups are buying naturist camps and filing the naturism off
Read the Spanish and French evidence side by side and one pattern falls out of it. In Spain, Colima Capital and Taiga — El Portús stripped of the word Naturista, Cala del Aceite becoming Taiga Conil, Cuevas del Mar becoming Taiga Almería Playa. In France, Capfun and Libranoo — Bélézy taken over in 2021, Arnaoutchot absorbed, and the Sablière, a fifty-year family domaine, changing character enough that a visiting club noted “les nouvelles orientations des lieux” in its own write-up.
Capfun, l’argent vous perdra sur ce site.
— a camper review of Bélézy, reported as rating 3.12/5 on park4night · that page no longer resolves, so the figure is recorded as reported, not verified
The detail that gives it away is small and administrative. At Arnaoutchot the paper site map was withdrawn — “il faut éviter le papier, selon le groupe !” — the welcome gift was scrapped, and a Far West rental quarter began eating camping pitches. None of that is about nudity. It is a holiday-park operating model arriving on ground that was built as something else, and the guests notice first: 700 verified reviews at Arna, 673 at Bélézy, and a Dutch write-up quoting the sign at the Bélézy exit — “U verlaat het paradijs. Bedek uzelf.” You are leaving paradise. Cover yourself. (That write-up has since 404’d; the quote is recorded here as unverifiable rather than dropped.)
Assault · chargedLAPDWNBR
Someone shot at the naked cyclists in Los Angeles, and a good deal of the internet cheered
On the morning of Saturday 28 June a man dressed entirely in black rode a scooter into the World Naked Bike Ride in downtown Los Angeles and fired a BB gun into the riders. Two were hit and treated at the scene for lacerations. The LAPD arrested him within minutes and charged him with assault with a deadly weapon. Those are the facts, and every outlet that carried them carried the same ones.
What this archive noticed is the second half. Of the coverage gathered here, a large share of the loudest posts treated the shooting as a joke or a public service — not all heroes wear capes, hero defends the streets, a string of laughing emoji under a report of two injured people. One clip of the story reached 3.7 million views, far more than any photograph of any ride in this issue. Two people were shot at for being naked in public, and the reaction was the story.
Naked bike ride is a dumb ass idea. Shooting people (even with a BB gun) is an even dumber idea.
— one of the few replies that held both thoughts at once
CancelledBuffalo RisingWNBR
Buffalo cancelled its ride after threats to the cyclists and the organisers
Three weeks after Los Angeles, the 2026 World Naked Bike Ride in Buffalo was called off. The reason given was threats — to the riders and to the people organising it. A ride that has run in dozens of cities for twenty-two years, and one city could not hold it.
It is worth setting beside the rest of this issue. The rides in Berlin, Brighton, London and Amsterdam all went ahead and are photographed on their own cards here. The pattern is not a movement in retreat; it is a movement that in 2026 needed to think about whether the people taking part were safe.
Campaignnational pressLondon
A year-long campaign to have the London ride scrapped, on safeguarding grounds
Through 2026 a single British campaigner has run a sustained public argument that the World Naked Bike Ride should not pass through streets where children are present, framing it as a child safeguarding question and addressing it directly to the Mayor of London. The campaign has been picked up well beyond its own following: petitions, national newspaper pieces, and a run in the Spectator Australia.
Roughly a quarter of everything this archive collected under the words \u201cnaked bike ride\u201d is that argument and the reaction to it, rather than the ride. None of it is naturist photography and none of it is in the gallery, but leaving it out of the magazine entirely would misdescribe the year. The rides went ahead. So did the campaign against them.
The legal position it runs into is on the law page: in England and Wales the exposure offence turns on intent and on what onlookers actually experienced, which is why the ride has been policed as a demonstration rather than an offence for twenty-two years.
