Fulhadhoo Beach

Fulhadhoo is an inhabited island in Baa Atoll, in the Maldives, with a population of around two hundred and fifty. It lies a few hours by ferry from Malé and is among the least visited inhabited islands in the country that receives visitors at all.

It belongs to the guesthouse Maldives rather than the resort one. The 2009 change in the law that permitted foreigners to stay on inhabited islands created a parallel country to the one in the brochures — cheaper, closer to how Maldivians live, and requiring visitors to observe local norms. Fulhadhoo has a handful of guesthouses and no resort, and it sits inside the Baa Atoll UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, which was designated in 2011 largely for Hanifaru Bay, where manta rays and whale sharks gather to feed between roughly May and November.

The beach is white coral sand on a shallow lagoon, with a long sandbar running off the western end that shifts with the season. The water is warm, pale and shallow; snorkelling from the beach reaches the reef edge, where the drop-off and its currents begin. A designated bikini beach is set aside for visitors, and modest dress is expected everywhere else on the island.

Development is a village: guesthouses of a few rooms, a shop or two, a mosque, and bicycles. There is no alcohol on inhabited islands anywhere in the Maldives, which is national law. Goidhoo and Fehendhoo, the two other inhabited islands on the same submerged reef, are within a short boat ride, and the three together hold fewer than a thousand people between them on an atoll rim of twenty-odd kilometres.

A village of two hundred and fifty people that lets a few visitors stay. There is a bikini beach and modest dress everywhere else, no alcohol anywhere on an inhabited island in the Maldives, and a public ferry that runs on set days. That arrangement is the whole point, and anyone who wants the other Maldives should book a resort island and be happy.