Bazaruto Island Beach

The Bazaruto Archipelago lies ten kilometres off Vilanculos in southern Mozambique — five islands that are not rock but sand, built on a submerged bar and rising in places to dunes over a hundred metres high. Bazaruto itself is the largest, some thirty-seven kilometres long.

The archipelago is a national park declared in 1971 and holds what is generally described as the last viable population of dugong in East Africa, a few hundred animals grazing the seagrass beds in the shallow lagoon between the islands and the mainland. Dugong are extraordinarily vulnerable to net entanglement and the population's survival here is the direct result of the park's fishing restrictions.

The beaches are white coral sand on the lagoon side, calm and shallow, and open ocean on the seaward side with real swell. The lagoon water is a series of blues that has made the aerial photograph of this archipelago one of the standard images of Mozambique. Sandbars appear and vanish with the tide and their positions change between seasons.

Development for visitors is a handful of lodges and nothing else — no hotels outside them, no roads of consequence, no day-trip infrastructure. The islands are not empty, though: several thousand people live on Bazaruto and Benguerra in fishing villages that predate the park by a long way, and it is their fishing the park's restrictions govern. Access is by boat or light aircraft from Vilanculos, and a park fee applies. Benguerra, the second island, has the other lodges, and Vilanculos on the mainland is where everything leaves from.

Islands made of sand rather than rock, with dunes over a hundred metres, and the last viable dugong population in East Africa grazing the seagrass between them. No towns and no day trips, but not empty either: the fishing villages were here before the park, and the restrictions that keep the dugong alive are restrictions on them. Boat or light aircraft from Vilanculos, a park fee, and a handful of expensive lodges. Benguerra has the others, and the aerial view of the lagoon on the flight in is the image the archipelago is known by.