The world's longest natural sea beach — 120km of unbroken Bay of Bengal shore, the freshest hilsa in Bangladesh, and the Buddhist Rakhine heritage of Teknaf
Cox's Bazar is the world's longest natural sea beach — 120km of continuous sandy beach running along the Bay of Bengal shore of southeastern Bangladesh, with no artificial breakwater or interruption along its entire length. The beach is the primary domestic tourism destination in Bangladesh (enormous in domestic terms — millions of Bangladeshi visitors each year) and increasingly known internationally, with investment in resort accommodation developing along the northern stretches (Kolatoli and Sugandha Beach areas) while the southern stretches (Himchari, Inani, Teknaf) remain less developed…
The area around Cox's Bazar was historically part of the Arakan Kingdom (present-day Rakhine State, Myanmar) and the Bengal Sultanate, with a predominantly Rakhine Buddhist population along the coast. The British colonial port of Cox's Bazar was established in 1854 as an administrative town named after Captain Hiram Cox, an 18th-century British officer who worked on settling Bengali refugees in the area. The city became significant in 2017 as the entry point for over 700,000 Rohingya refugees fleeing the Myanmar military's ethnic cleansing campaign in Rakhine State — the Kutupalong refugee ca…