Nusa Dua Beach

Nusa Dua occupies the eastern side of Bali's Bukit peninsula, a purpose-built resort enclave developed from the 1970s under a government plan intended to concentrate large-scale tourism in one place and keep it away from the rest of the island. The beach runs a few kilometres along the front of it.

It is worth documenting as a piece of policy. The plan worked in its own terms: the enclave is landscaped, secure, staffed and separate, entered through gates, with the villages that supply it outside. Whether concentrating tourism in an enclave benefits an island more than dispersing it is a genuine argument, and Bali has since done both.

The shore is pale golden sand on a reef flat, with the reef far enough out to remove the swell and leave shallow, calm, warm water. At low tide the flat is exposed and swimming becomes difficult; at high tide the beach narrows. There is a paved promenade running the length of the enclave, which is public and open, and a water blow — a natural sea spout in the rocks at the southern end — that draws its own visitors. The enclave's beaches carry names of their own — Geger at the southern end sits outside the gates and is used by Balinese families and seaweed farmers, and it is the one stretch here that does not feel landscaped.

Development is complete and controlled: large hotels behind landscaped grounds, a convention centre, a golf course and a shopping complex, all inside the gates. Indonesian law makes the beach public, and the promenade is the practical way in for anyone not staying, which is worth knowing because the arrangement is not obvious from outside.

A 1971 master plan recommended putting Bali's large hotels in one enclave to protect the rest of the island, and this is that enclave — three hundred hectares of reclaimed scrub with buried services and a perimeter. Whether it protected the rest is answered in the negative by the south-west coast, but the logic is legible on the ground.