A Mare Liscia Ruja

A Mare opened in June 2024 and immediately refused the two templates that dominate this coast, the hotel beach and the party lido. Its Milan architects went back to photographs of the Costa Smeralda’s earliest bathing spots and rebuilt that vocabulary in raw timber and pergola shade among the junipers, then attached a kitchen that has no business being this ambitious on a beach: the menu is selected by Antonio Mellino of Quattro Passi in Nerano, a restaurant with three Michelin stars. The scale stays deliberately human, about thirty umbrella stations and sixty sunbeds, with jazz and ambient records where other clubs put a console.

It enters our Sardinia club directory as the dining led counterweight to its neighbour White Beach Club on the same sand and the full theatre of Nikki Beach around the headland. This profile weighs what the unpublished bed fee actually buys, what the kitchen delivers, and when the free beach next door is the better call.

Start with the arithmetic, because on this coast it is rarely this favourable. A national beach club guide documents that A Mare bundles beach towels, fresh drinking water and parking into the price of the station, and adds waiter service to the bed, wifi and a garden behind the sand. Each of those is a line item almost everywhere else on the Costa Smeralda, where a summer parking spot is its own small economy and a forgotten towel becomes a rental. Whatever figure the club quotes for your date, and it will only be by asking, the quote covers more of the day than the headline number at the larger lidos along this bay. Dogs are allowed on the beach too, which is close to unheard of at this level.

The kitchen is the reason the place exists. Mellino’s menu reads almost defiantly plain: spaghetti with a trio of tomato preparations, fregola with seafood, a fried basket of fish and vegetables, fruit crostata where other clubs send out sculpture. The cellar leans on Sardinian producers, and the bar’s signature is the Sunset Paloma, built on mezcal. In the 2025 season the club poured a beach aperitif daily from 16:00 to 18:30, aimed at the hour when the light goes gold over the bay. Live sets stay acoustic and low, the dress code does not exist, and boats can call a taxi tender rather than anchor watch: the whole machine is tuned for a long lunch that dissolves into early evening.

The honest caveats are physical and financial. The concession is small and its umbrellas sit close together, so a February daydream of privacy will not survive an August Saturday; you are buying proximity to a kitchen, not seclusion. No rate for beds or spend is published, and a menu consulted by a three star chef, served on the most fashionable coast in Italy, will bill accordingly, so ask for numbers before you commit rather than after the second bottle. If the budget is the deciding vote, book only the table: the swimming is identical fifty metres along the free sand, and it costs precisely nothing.

Liscia Ruja earns its crowds honestly: a wide, unhurried curve of pale sand where the water deepens so gradually that a swim starts as a long warm wade. Our Liscia Ruja beach guide covers the full sweep, including the free stretches that survive between the concessions and the quieter ends that absorb the July overflow. When you want the opposite frame, granite pockets and water like cut glass, the coves of Capriccioli are minutes up the coast.

The turn for Liscia Ruja leaves the Porto Cervo to Capriccioli coast road and drops toward the bay on an unhurried minor lane; follow the beach signs and keep going until the parking areas behind the dunes. For A Mare guests the parking is part of the deal, which removes the one genuinely stressful transaction of a Costa Smeralda beach morning. Guests of the nearby grand hotels can use the club’s land shuttle instead, and anyone arriving by water can radio for the taxi tender rather than swim in from anchor.

Booking splits in two. Lunch tables reserve online through the club’s engine, which makes the restaurant the easy half to lock in. Beds are a conversation by phone or email, and so are the numbers, since nothing is published. If you would rather skip the exchange, send your date and party size below: we put the request to the club, come back with the real rate and any minimum, and you decide with the figures in front of you. There is no charge for the exchange and nothing is booked until you say so.