Les Salines

Grande Anse des Salines is at the southern tip of Martinique, a French overseas department in the Lesser Antilles. It is around a kilometre of pale sand fringed by coconut palms, facing the Caribbean, with a salt pond behind it that gives the beach its name.

Martinique's geology divides the island in two, and this beach sits at the white end of it. The north is volcanic — Mont Pelée destroyed Saint-Pierre in 1902, killing nearly the entire population of some thirty thousand people in minutes, and the beaches there are black. The south is older limestone and coral and the sand is pale. Driving from one to the other takes an hour and the change is complete.

The bay is sheltered and shallow with warm calm water and a very gradual entry, which makes it the standard family beach of the island and busy on Sundays with Martiniquais rather than visitors. Manchineel trees grow along the back of the beach and are marked with red bands; their sap burns and sheltering under them in rain causes blistering. The savannah of petrified trees at the eastern end and the salt pond behind the beach are both part of a protected area, and the whole southern tip of Martinique is drier and flatter than the volcanic north around Mont Pelée.

Development is deliberately light: a car park, food vans, showers and a protected area behind. There is no hotel on the beach. Being a French department means European infrastructure — roads, health care, supermarkets — which is the practical difference from the independent islands nearby.

The savannah of petrified trees behind the sand is worth the walk and almost nobody makes it. Martinique's north is volcanic and dark and its south is white and flat, and the difference across sixty kilometres is total. Come early: this is the island's beach and the island knows it.