Siesta Key Beach

The World's Finest, Whitest Sand

This is our beach access. There is no parking here. Only those who can walk get to sit on this part of the beach making it a quiet place to be. The main beach with bathrooms and snack stand are only a little walk along the beach.

"When it comes to white, powdery sand, nothing compares with Siesta Key, Florida. In fact, in the Great International Sand Challenge held in 1987, siesta Key's Crescent Beach was rated "The World's Finest, Whitest Sand," beating out more than 30 other entries, including the Bahamas and Grand Cayman.

It's clean, it's dazzling white and it feels like confectioner's sugar.

Why? It's the quartz. A study of Siesta Key beach sand by Harvard University's geology department found that the sand was 99 percent pure quartz grains, ultimately derived from the southern Appalachian Mountains. Over millenniums, sand grains were carried by rivers into the Gulf and down Florida's coast. Those quartz grains are very fine, without any coral or shell fragments, which results in sand with a soft, flour-like texture.

Quartz sand comes from igneous rock, the kind of rock that once was molten. Quartz is a very hard substance, graded at 7 on a hardness scale of 10. Diamonds are rated 10 on this scale. Minerals of hardness 7 cannot be scratched with the point of a steel knife. The most common such substance is granite."

Quoted from a Siesta Key Chamber of Commerce Flyer.