Cable Beach, Broome: Red Cliffs, White Sand and Sunset Camels
Cable Beach sits on the edge of Broome, a remote town in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, where the Indian Ocean meets a long run of white sand backed by rust-red pindan cliffs. It stretches for roughly 22 kilometres along the coast, wide enough at low tide to drive a four-wheel-drive vehicle across the firm sand. It is one of the country's best-known beaches not for a single dramatic feature but for the way its colours and rhythms change through the day, culminating most evenings in a camel train silhouetted against the setting sun.
A Coastline Carved from Red and White
The beach takes its character from the contrast between two colours: the deep red-brown of the pindan soil that forms low cliffs at its northern end, and the pale, almost white sand that runs the length of the shore. Pindan is the local term for the iron-rich earth found across this part of the Kimberley, and its oxidised colour intensifies dramatically at sunset, when the low sun turns the cliffs a deeper red and throws long shadows across the sand. The beach faces west across the Indian Ocean, which is part of why it has become so associated with sunset watching. Few beaches in Australia are so reliably oriented toward an unobstructed ocean horizon at day's end.
The Cable That Gave the Beach Its Name
Cable Beach is named for a very specific piece of infrastructure history rather than any natural feature. In 1889, a submarine telegraph cable was laid from Broome to Java, in what is now Indonesia, connecting Western Australia to the wider British colonial telegraph network and, from there, to the rest of the world. The cable came ashore at this beach, and the name stuck long after the line itself was decommissioned. It is a reminder that Broome's importance long predated its current status as a tourist destination: this small, isolated town was once a genuine link in global communications, connecting the edge of the continent to Asia and Europe.
Camels at Sunset
The single most photographed activity at Cable Beach is the evening camel ride. Strings of camels, led in single file by local operators, walk along the firm sand near the waterline as the sun drops toward the horizon, and visitors ride in slow procession while the light shifts from gold to deep orange to red. Camels were first introduced to this part of Australia in the nineteenth century to support exploration and transport across the arid interior, where horses struggled with the heat, distances and lack of water. Their descendants, and camels bred and trained specifically for tourism, now spend their working lives walking the beach at dusk rather than crossing the outback, a curious evolution of a working animal into a coastal icon. The rides typically run in the cooler dry season months, when conditions are most comfortable for both animals and visitors, and bookings are usually necessary given how popular the experience has become.
Tides Like Nowhere Else
Broome sits on a stretch of coast with one of the largest tidal ranges anywhere in the world, and Cable Beach makes that range highly visible. At low tide the beach becomes extraordinarily wide, exposing flat, firm sand that stretches far out toward the water and allows vehicles and pedestrians to walk or drive across ground that will be entirely submerged a few hours later. This dramatic swing between high and low water shapes almost everything about how the beach is used: driving times, swimming conditions, and even where camel operators choose to walk their strings depend on the state of the tide on any given day. Visitors are generally advised to check tide tables before planning a beach visit, since the beach at full high tide can look like an entirely different place from the same stretch of sand six hours later. The exposed flats at low tide also draw wading birds that feed on small creatures left behind by the retreating water, adding a quieter layer of activity to a beach better known for its sunset crowds.
Swimming, Stingers and the Wet Season
Like much of tropical northern Australia, the waters off Broome are affected by seasonal marine stingers, and swimmers are generally advised to take local warnings seriously during the warmer, wetter months of the year. The distinction between the dry season, roughly May to October, and the wet season, roughly November to April, shapes almost every practical aspect of a visit to Cable Beach. The dry season brings clear skies, comfortable temperatures and calm seas, and is when the great majority of visitors arrive, camel operators run daily rides, and the beach is at its busiest. The wet season brings heat, humidity, monsoonal rain and the possibility of cyclones sweeping in off the Indian Ocean, and while the beach remains beautiful, it sees far fewer visitors and some tourism operators reduce or pause their services. This seasonal rhythm is worth understanding before planning a trip, since a beach that feels crowded with sunset watchers in July can feel almost empty and dramatically stormier in January.
Gantheaume Point and Ancient Footprints
At the southern end of Cable Beach, the coastline rises into the red cliffs of Gantheaume Point, a headland known for two very different attractions. A small lighthouse marks the point itself, while at the base of the cliffs, dinosaur footprints estimated to be many millions of years old are exposed in the rock at very low tide. These tracks, left by large theropods that once walked along what would then have been a very different coastline, are only visible for short windows around the lowest tides of the year, making them one of the more elusive attractions in the Broome area. The point also offers sweeping views back along the length of Cable Beach, giving a sense of scale that is harder to appreciate from sand level.
Broome Beyond the Beach
Broome's history is inseparable from the pearling industry that built the town in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pearl luggers once worked these waters in large numbers, and the town's population and culture were shaped by the Aboriginal, Japanese, Chinese, Malay and European communities who worked in and around the pearling trade. Traces of that history remain visible in Broome's Chinatown precinct, in its historic cemetery, and in the pearl showrooms that still operate along the main streets. Cable Beach itself was, for much of that era, a working stretch of coast rather than a resort, and its transformation into a tourism destination is comparatively recent, layered on top of a much older story of trade, survival and cross-cultural exchange in one of Australia's most remote corners.
The town's isolation is itself part of the story. Broome sits roughly two thousand kilometres from Perth by road, closer in many respects to parts of Asia than to most of Australia's larger cities, and this remoteness has long shaped who came here and why, from pearl divers arriving from overseas in the pearling era to travellers today who make the journey specifically for the Kimberley coastline. That sense of being somewhere genuinely far-flung is part of what gives an evening at Cable Beach, watching the sun disappear into the Indian Ocean at the edge of the continent, its particular atmosphere.
Explore on the map
Cable Beach's position at the western edge of the Kimberley, its long red cliffs, and the surrounding sights around Broome are easiest to appreciate with the coastline laid out in front of you. Head to the map to see exactly where Cable Beach sits in relation to Gantheaume Point, the town of Broome, and the wider Kimberley coast, and to plan how the different parts of this stretch of Western Australia connect.