Fulong Beach
"I did not expect Taiwan's best beach to require a train, a bridge, and a river crossing to reach it. It is worth every step."
A wide golden-sand beach on the northeast coast, framed by a red arched footbridge and an annual sand sculpture festival that turns the shoreline into an open-air gallery.
The train from Taipei to Fulong takes just over an hour along a coastline that gets progressively more dramatic — tunnels through headlands, brief glimpses of turquoise water, fishing villages stacked into hillsides — and by the time we stepped off the platform, Lia had already decided this was going to be a beach day whether or not the weather fully cooperated. It cooperated.
Crossing the Red Bridge to Get There
Fulong’s beach sits across the mouth of the Shuang River from the train station, and the crossing is part of the experience: a long, arched red pedestrian bridge, cartoonishly photogenic, spanning the river mouth where it meets the ocean. We crossed it slowly, stopping twice for photos we didn’t need, watching kayakers paddle the calm river water on one side and surfers work the breaking waves on the other.
On the far side, the sand opens out wider than almost any beach I’d seen in Taiwan — pale gold, fine-grained, backed by pine trees rather than development, which after months of Mexican beach towns lined wall-to-wall with hotels felt almost radically undercommercialized.
Sand Castles as Serious Art
We happened to arrive during the tail end of the Fulong International Sand Sculpture Festival, an annual event that brings sculptors from around the world to build enormous, intricate works directly on the beach — dragons, mythological figures, entire architectural scenes, all built from packed sand and destined to erode back into the tide within weeks. Some of the pieces stood taller than either of us.
We walked the full length of the sculpture row, then spent the rest of the afternoon doing the less artistic version of the same activity — building a lopsided, structurally doomed sandcastle of our own before the tide reclaimed it within the hour, exactly as it would eventually reclaim the professionals’ work too.
When to go: Summer (June–September) for swimming and the sand sculpture festival, though the beach and river crossing are pleasant nearly year-round outside of typhoon season. Weekday visits avoid the Taipei crowds that descend by train on weekends.