Geger Beach

Geger is at the southern end of Nusa Dua, on Bali's Bukit peninsula — a stretch of white coral sand inside a reef, at the edge of an area that was planned rather than grown.

Nusa Dua was built as a state project. In 1971 a French consultancy produced a master plan for Balinese tourism that recommended concentrating large hotels in one enclave to protect the rest of the island, and Nusa Dua is that enclave: three hundred hectares of reclaimed scrub, developed from the 1970s with buried services, controlled architecture and a security perimeter. Whether it protected the rest of Bali is a question the island's south-west coast answers in the negative, but the plan's logic is legible on the ground and the enclave works as designed.

Geger is the interesting edge of it. The reef flat here is still farmed for seaweed by families from the village behind, and at low tide the plots and the workers are visible from the sand — one of the few places on Bali where an older economy and the resort one occupy the same square metres. The lagoon is shallow, calm and reef-protected, with easy swimming at high water and a long exposed flat at low. The enclave has its own water treatment and buried services, which was the point of building it as one unit rather than plot by plot.

A temple, Pura Geger, sits on the headland above. The public access path runs beside the resorts and is signposted, since Indonesian law provides for coastal access. Pandawa, around the headland, is a beach reached through a cut in the limestone cliff and was inaccessible until the road was blasted through in the 2010s.

Seaweed farmers working the reef flat in front of a resort enclave planned in 1971 to keep Bali's large hotels in one place — and the south-west coast is the evidence on whether that worked. Swim at high water; the flat is exposed at low. The two economies share the same square metres here, which is rare enough on this island to be the reason for the record.