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Winter Insider · August 2026 Winter 2026

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Western Port

Somers

Tea-tree dunes and shallow Western Port water at Somers beach

Photo · Peninsula Insider

Somers is a quiet residential village on the Mornington Peninsula's Western Port coast, 80 km from Melbourne, fronting a long sheltered beach and bordering Coolart Wetlands and Homestead Reserve.

Somers is the quiet Western Port answer to the bay-side beach villages, and it has been keeping that profile low on purpose for a century. The village is set back from a long shallow beach with tea-tree banking the dunes, a small general store, a yacht club that has changed almost nothing about itself since the 1950s, and not much else. Coolart Wetlands and Homestead, set in its 87-hectare reserve on the village edge, is the other reason to come - one of the best places to walk a wetland boardwalk under a winter sky on the entire Peninsula. The Lord Somers Camp gives the village a residual association with leadership weeks and a particular kind of Australian institutional history. Stay here if you want a beach village without polish, where the loudest sound in the morning is birds in the reserve.

A sheltered Western Port beach and a wetland reserve at the village edge - the quiet Peninsula at full strength.

Peninsula Insider - editor's note

Is Somers the right base?

Who this place rewards - and who should keep driving

It's for

  • birders
  • young families
  • readers

It's not for

  • anyone needing a restaurant strip
  • swimmers chasing waves

Looking for nightlife or a polished main street - Somers is a residential village, not a destination village.

Somers in brief

Somers in four lines

  1. 01 Somers is a deliberately quiet Western Port beach village - long sheltered beach, tea-tree dunes, a 1950s-era yacht club, and the Coolart wetlands on the edge.
  2. 02 Best for: birders; families wanting flat, safe wading water; readers who want to disappear into a holiday-house weekend.
  3. 03 Signature experience: a dawn walk through Coolart wetlands, then a long swim from the beach when the tide is in.
  4. 04 Two nights minimum, ideally midweek in spring.
  5. 05 There is no restaurant strip - pre-book in Balnarring or self-cater.

A perfect day here

A day in Somers

Dawn at Coolart on the wetland boardwalk, late breakfast back at the rental, midday swim from the beach, afternoon read on the dunes, sundowner from the verandah.

Coolart's homestead and wetland walk is one of the Peninsula's most underrated free experiences - go in winter for the migratory wading birds.

- Editor's note

Planning guides

Service guides for your Somers trip

Long-form editorial that helps you build a weekend, not just a list of places.

All Peninsula guides →
3-Day Peninsula Itinerary → Weekend Plans → Best Brunch Guide → Hot Springs Guide → Winter Guide → Dog-Friendly Peninsula →

Where it sits

Somers on the Peninsula

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Keep going

Nearby places worth knowing next

Because a Peninsula trip is always made up of two or three pockets, not one.

Red Hill · village

Balnarring

Balnarring is the village that locals still treat as their own - a cluster of shops, a Thursday morning farmers' market, a bookshop that has outlasted all reasonable expectations, and a road network that somehow always seems to lead back to a cellar door. It sits on the eastern edge of the Peninsula's wine country, closer to Western Port than Port Phillip, and that changes the character: the light is softer, the crowds are thinner, and the vineyards here tend to be smaller family operations rather than destination estates. Balnarring is where you go when you want a Peninsula weekend that feels like the way things used to work before the region became a brand. The beach is genuine and quiet, the coffee is unpretentious, and the drive in from Tedesca or Montalto takes fifteen minutes of roads you've mostly never seen.

Western Port · town

Hastings

Hastings sits on the eastern, working side of the Peninsula - the Western Port side, with its mangroves, mudflats, and fishing fleet. It is not a tourist town and never has tried to be, which is exactly what makes it useful. The fishermen's co-op here supplies some of the best seafood in Melbourne, the mussel farms offshore are among the largest sustainable producers in Australia, and if you are driving back from French Island or heading down to Flinders the long way round, Hastings is the place to stop for fish and chips eaten on the pier. The town itself is unvarnished in a way the western Peninsula no longer is, and that counts for something.

Western Port · village

Merricks Beach

Merricks Beach is a hamlet, not a town, and is largely the work of one generation of holiday-house builders who put up timber shacks along the dunes in the 1950s and 60s and then refused to let the place change much since. The beach is shallow, tide-dependent, and quiet - there is no surf, no foreshore café strip, and at low tide it spreads out into hundreds of metres of flat sand that visiting children turn into a private kingdom. The Merricks General Store, technically up in Merricks village, is the one polished thing nearby and is famous for a reason. Stay at Merricks Beach if you want the holiday-house feeling the Peninsula has mostly lost: front-door dunes, no shops, neighbours you have to walk past, and an evening rhythm built around a sundowner on the verandah.

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Peninsula This Weekend 18 to 19 July

July sits in the quieter stretch of Peninsula winter, and that is the point. The lead booking is a truffle hunt at Red Hill. Sunday is for the sculpture park at Pt. Leo.

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Somers, by location

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