Sorrento Beach

This is a great family friendly beach, with small to medium waves in summer. They usually have Surf Lifesavers in summer too, so there’s that added safety for children. Easy beach access with the car-​park right next to the beach, no dunes or steep stairs. The beach can get quite busy because of these reasons and also the activity at The Surf Lifesaving Club attached.
All in all a gorgeous clean beach, but I would only head there about once a year as I personally prefer a more secluded beach.

Beautiful beach! Even though I normally end up at Scarborough, this place is well worth the extra drive up north. It’s one of the cleanest beachest I have been too and there is a huge selection of places to eat afterwards. The large car park is an added bonus too.

This is the only northern suburbs beach, to my knowledge, that caters for the ginger ninjas. That is, this is the only place you will find a large shady tent on the sand, right on the ocean front. This tent is a permanent fixture in the warmer months. Adjacent to a kiosk, change rooms and on a clean, white sand, patrolled beach, you don’t get it much better than this in Perth.

If you’re spending the day at Hillarys and it’s starting to feel a little packed and over run with tourists then head just around the corner to Sorrento, you can easily walk here from Hillarys, so it’s easy to bail on the visiting relatives if you must!
Sorrento has a bit of everything, a big lawn to set up blankets, picnics, board games etc. and spread out easily. There are BBQs to cook up your food and a few benches with shade to sit and eat at. The lawn is right on the beach as well, which has fabulous soft white sand, and is a good place to set up a volleyball net and spend the day playing with your friends or family. The ocean is nice, you don’t really want to swim in Hillarys, sure the jetty is fun to jump off but the waters a bit mank. So coming round to the clean water of Sorrento is a nice relief, not too much seaweed or stingers either, and the water is a nice relief from the WA heat. It’s a good place to spend the day, you can set up camp in the morning and pretty much stay there. It’s also good to grab a coffee or fish and chips from Hillarys and then walk over to the lawn or beach of Sorrento and chill out a bit more!

Sorrento is a sweet beach.
Hillary’s gets so much attention, it is easy to take the picturesque coastline for granted as your senses are consumed with fun parks, food and rainbows of consumerism but this beach is gorgeous. The beach is framed with a large rock wall that follows the coast line up. Hugging this man made barrier is a miscellaneous gravel strip.. . «not quite a foot path– not quite a parking bay» getting closer to the entrance of Sorrento this strip leads onto a wooden boardwalk that leads you down, amongst the grass and open air shower stations to a grassy picnic, bbq and cricket hot spot. The brick structures there are similar to what I imagine a miniature can turfed mecca to look like.
There are always several entry points to the sand, basically the path of least resistance is a favourable one, passing bright yellow bins suspended on poles to minimise the rubbish– great move. The sand is clean, the ocean, in my eyes is tame but refreshing and the Surf Life Saving presence– with the life savers conducting their little nippers programs and training at the patrolled section of the beach is tops!
Life is a beach at Sorrento!

Looking south along the coast from Sorrento Beach, I often find myself reminded, in a weird sort of way, of Havana. Hyper-​capitalist boom-​time Perth doesn’t have much in common with Communist Cuba, of course, but there’s something about the coastline that nevertheless takes me back.
I think it has something to do with the nature, the temperament, of the water. Unlike the placid and anodyne Pacific, which laps at Australia’s eastern coast pathetically, the Indian Ocean hurls itself at Western Australia almost spitefully. The Atlantic does something similar along Havana’s Avenida Antonio Maceo, its waves crashing into the malecón, or sea wall, and rising, as Graham Greene once put it, «like a Christmas tree covered with plastic frost».
Sorrento doesn’t have a sea wall, or even very many waves. But when I look out over its choppy waters – let alone when I swim in them – I still get the same sense that I did in Havana: the sea is old, and angry, and marvellous.