Half Moon Bay

Half Moon Bay is on the south-eastern corner of Antigua, a kilometre-long crescent facing the Atlantic, backed by low scrub and reached down a road that is deliberately not improved. It is a national park.

The bay works because of its shape. The eastern end is open to Atlantic swell and has a shore break that people body-surf; the western end is sheltered by the headland and the reef, and is calm enough for children. Walking from one end to the other takes you through the whole range, which is unusual on a single beach.

The sand is pale coral, coarse and clean, and the water clear. The bay faces east into the trade wind, which blows here all year and keeps this side of the island cooler, rougher and less built on than the leeward west. Antigua is a low limestone and volcanic island with a great many small beaches — the claim of three hundred and sixty-five is roughly accurate — and Half Moon is generally reckoned the best of them by people who live there, partly because nothing has been built on it. Rendezvous Bay on the southern coast is the island's other undeveloped stretch, reachable only on foot or by boat over a hill track; between them they are what Antigua looked like before the 1980s.

There is a ruined hotel behind the beach, closed since Hurricane Luis in 1995 and never rebuilt, and the redevelopment of the site has been disputed for decades. Facilities amount to a beach bar at the western end, a car park and nothing else.

A hotel stood here until Hurricane Luis took it in 1995 and nothing has been built since, because people organised to keep it that way. Swim at the northern end where the reef shelters it; the southern end faces the open Atlantic and has no lifeguard.