18 of them across inner Sydney, 9 free to swim — each one placed on the isometric map with the walk from the nearest station or wharf worked out. Two different swims hide under the one word: a rock pool takes the surf over its wall, a harbour bath is still water behind a net.
9 pools sit on the six-kilometre cliff walk, close enough that the swim decides the stop rather than the other way round. Tap any one to open it on the map.
Netted, flat and shallow at the edges — the choice when the surf is up, when you're swimming with children, or when you want laps without a set rolling through.
An ocean pool is part of the sea: on a big swell the sets break straight over the wall, and the safest-looking corner is where the surge lands. Councils drain and scrub them on a roster, so a pool can be empty on a perfect day with no notice online. A few charge entry — 9 of the 18 here are free, the rest sell a ticket or a season pass — and one, McIver's at Coogee, is women and children only, as it has been for more than a century. Check the swell and the council's notices before a special trip; the map tells you where a pool is, not whether it is open today.
Every pool here is a mapped feature in OpenStreetMap, filtered to publicly accessible water — hotel plunge pools and gym spas are out. Suburb, walking time and the free/ticketed split come from our own data: the walk is straight-line distance with a detour factor, measured to the nearest train station, wharf or light-rail stop, and only shown when it is under 1.5 km. Several of the coastal pools show no transport at all, and that is the map being honest rather than the pools being unreachable — the eastern-beaches bus network is what gets you there, and bus stops are not mapped here yet. The long read is in the blog: Sydney's ocean pools and harbour baths.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).