Spiagge bianche — Attraction in Rosignano Marittimo

The atmosphere of the beach is breathtaking. It's really like you'd be in Maldives or Seychelles. The color of the water and the white sand, well, a piece of our heart stayed there forever. The sand BTW is not sand, not even from white shells' powder, it's from limestone coming from an old factory. Because it's white it's not recommended to stay there for more than a few hours, even people with good skin burnt to red and spent their night and the next few days on pain. In the main season you can rent sunbrellas and I'm not sure but maybe sunbeds too. There are toilets and shower you have to pay for it/them. It's a long beach, there are three path to reach it, one on the northern part, one approximately on the middle and one on south. We approached from south so if parking, I can talk about it only. The parking lot is not too large, there are spaces only for 15-20 cars (including 2-3 for disabled people) and a few motorbikes for free for all day. You have to arrive early to have one for yourselves. Right next to these lot there's another one opening from this one. It has a barrier/bar that is - according to locals - closed only at festive times which are mostly on weekends. But even those times you can use that parking lot for some fee which was €7 for all day (2025). It's a bigger one, a lot more car...

Fascinating place! The sand is very white, because of the calcium carbonate (and maybe some calcium chloride?) run-off from the Solvay factory close by. There are many people here posting on the internet, that are scared of the "industrial waste", but these substances are completely harmless. CaCO3 is the same substance as the one corals leave behind to form Caribbean natural white beaches and calcium chloride is used in food and to treat calcium deficiency! I was also wondering if the rumours are true, that there are large amounts of heavy metals in these waters, so I took a water sample and asked a friend who works in a lab (in Germany) to test it for poisonous substances and heavy metals and they didn't find anything that would be considered problematic or over the legal limits. Basically just normal sea water as you get it in the mediterranean... I guess the Blue Flag seal can be trusted after all. Maybe if you live there permanently small residues can have a negative efffect, I maybe wouldn't want to bathe there every day for decades. But a few times now and then is ok I guess.

So I keep bathing occasionally when we visit this man made white beach without worries. The atmosphere is really special...

For anyone wondering, and to warn unsuspecting tourists who think they've magically landed in the Maldives: the unusual color of the sand and sea is the result of about a century of industrial waste (including heavy metals like mercury, chromium, and arsenic) dumped into the sea by a Solvay plant, about a kilometer off the coast. Access to the beach is via a small hill, which until 1983 served as a landfill for production waste and household waste. You may be wondering how it's possible that the same body (ARPA) that certified the coast's high levels of pollution, with evidence of emissions over the last hundred years, also confirms the suitability of this stretch of sea for swimming? The apparent inconsistency is due to the parameters chosen by the authorities: the required monitoring is, in fact, exclusively biological in nature. A stretch of sea that is chemically highly polluted, but with levels of bacteria such as Escherichia coli below the prescribed limits, is therefore considered safe and is not subject to restrictions on use...