Portobello Beach Layover From Edinburgh

Portobello is Edinburgh’s beach: over a mile of sand and a paved promenade on the Firth of Forth, about half an hour east of Princes Street on the bus, with a Victorian swim centre and Turkish baths on the seafront and a high street of independent shops one block back.

Over a mile of sand and a promenade at Portobello

The promenade runs the full length of the beach, paved, flat and open at any hour, with tenements and Victorian villas along the landward side and the water on the other. It costs nothing, and there is not a step on it from one end to the other.

It used to be considerably grander. Portobello was Edinburgh’s seaside resort in the late 19th century, with a pleasure pier off the end of Bath Street that opened in 1871: 1,250 feet of iron carrying a tea room, a concert hall and a camera obscura, designed by Thomas Bouch, whose Tay Bridge fell into the river with a train on it eight years later. The pier’s own ironwork rusted through and it came down in 1917. An open-air heated pool followed in 1936, warmed by the coal-fired power station next door and staffed at one point by a young Sean Connery; when the power station shut in 1978 the water went cold, the pool closed the next year, and it was demolished in 1988. None of it is there now. What is left is the sand.

The 1898 swim centre and its Victorian Turkish baths

At 57 The Promenade, a building of 1898 holds a swimming pool that still looks like a Victorian swimming pool: white cast-iron columns, a balcony round three sides, a clock on the end wall.

Behind it are the Turkish baths, and these are the reason to walk in: three hot rooms rising in temperature, a steam room, a cold plunge pool and a room to lie down in afterwards, worked through over about an hour and three quarters. They are the only publicly available Victorian Turkish baths in Edinburgh and one of a very small number still operating anywhere in Scotland. A £7.5 million refurbishment of the whole building has been approved in principle, including a restoration of the baths to their 1906 layout, and it will close the place while the work runs, so confirm it is open before you build an afternoon around it.

No train to Portobello any more, just the bus

Portobello had a station on the main line east from 1846, which is how the Victorian day-trippers got here, and it closed in 1964. Getting out now means Lothian’s service 26 from Princes Street, about half an hour along London Road, and several other Lothian routes cover the same corner of the city. The ride is the cost of this trip: an hour of your afternoon goes on the round journey before you have set foot on the promenade, so it is a plan for four hours rather than two, and a suitcase riding out and back with you makes both legs slower for no benefit.

Portobello High Street, a block back from the sand

One street inland the seafront turns into an ordinary Edinburgh suburb going about its business: a high street of independent shops and coffee houses, none of it aimed at visitors.

That is most of the appeal of coming out here. Portobello is not a preserved resort or an attraction; it is where a chunk of Edinburgh lives, which after a morning on the Royal Mile is a noticeable change of register.

The bus back to Waverley connects straight to the Airlink

Service 26 runs back to Princes Street in the same half hour it took getting out, and from Waverley Bridge the Airlink 100 leaves for Edinburgh Airport up to every ten minutes until 01:00, £6 single for the 30-minute ride.

Head back in with time for both legs, the bus and the ride out to the terminal, rather than just the airport leg alone. If a beach is not what the afternoon needs, the main Edinburgh guide keeps everything within a fifteen-minute walk of Waverley and climbs rather than flattens.