Bang Tao
Bang Tao is two places sharing one long beach. On the southern half, the Laguna complex — five hotels linked by shuttle boats across interconnected lagoons — was built in 1987 on land that spent the previous century being stripped for tin. On the northern half, the old village of Cherngtalay carries on: a Buddhist temple that has stood for over a hundred years, a small Taoist shrine older than the twentieth century, and a Monday night market that wraps up before nine.
The beach itself runs six kilometres, wide and gently sloped, with the kind of entry into the sea that makes swimming easy rather than athletic. Most of the resort infrastructure sits behind it, which means the sand feels less crowded than the distance from Patong might lead you to expect.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to stay inside the Laguna complex one trip, then rent something in the village the next. The Friday market at Boat Avenue is the social anchor — go early, the food stalls fill up. And the Laguna Phuket Triathlon in November, running since 1994, draws a crowd worth watching even if you're not racing.
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Book directly at the providerHow Bang Tao came to be
Before the hotels, Bang Tao was a working tin-mining site drawing labour from China and beyond — extraction that shaped the land and left it scarred by the time the industry collapsed in the 1980s. In 1984, Singapore-based investors formed Laguna Resorts & Hotels, acquired roughly a thousand acres of that depleted ground, and set about rebuilding it into something else entirely. By 1987 the Laguna Phuket complex had opened; the golf club followed in 1992, designed by Max Wexler and David Abell and later the first course in Thailand certified by Audubon International for environmental conservation.
The village predates all of this by centuries. Around 1901, a local hairdresser named Mr Ju Pai Tuk brought three wooden Taoist deity images from China to establish what became the Cherngtalay Shrine. Wat Cherngtalay, the Buddhist temple at the heart of the community, has been a spiritual centre for over a hundred years, relocated to its current site in the 1970s.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
November through April is the dry season on this western-facing coast — temperatures hold steady around 29–30°C and the sea lies flat. From May onward the southwest monsoon arrives, and Bang Tao, sitting on Phuket's western slopes, catches the bulk of the island's annual 2,200-plus millimetres of rain; October is the wettest month by some distance.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.