Praia de Santa Mónica

Praia de Santa Mónica runs along the south-western coast of Boa Vista, in the eastern Cape Verde islands. It is eighteen kilometres of pale sand and it is, for most of its length, entirely empty.

Boa Vista is desert. The island sits around five hundred kilometres off Senegal and receives almost no rain; the interior is sand and stone, and the harmattan carries Saharan dust across it for part of the year, which is what makes the light here hazy and orange in winter. Two of the archipelago's islands, this and Maio, are effectively extensions of the Sahara across water.

The beach faces the open Atlantic with real swell, a shore break and strong currents; swimming is possible in places and unwise in others, and there is no supervision anywhere along it. What the beach is genuinely good for is walking — you can walk for hours and meet nobody — and for turtles. Boa Vista holds one of the largest loggerhead nesting populations in the world, with several thousand nests a season, and organised night patrols run from June to October. Boa Vista's interior is a desert of dunes and dry riverbeds crossed by tracks, and the island has more sand than the rest of the archipelago combined.

Development is two large resorts at the northern end and nothing at all beyond them. Access to the empty sections is by four-wheel drive or on foot. Sal, an hour by ferry, has the resorts and the wind sports; Boa Vista has the space.

Eighteen kilometres and no shade on any of it. Walk as far as you like and remember how far the car is. Loggerheads nest here in numbers that make Boa Vista one of the most important sites in the world, and the night patrols are the only responsible way to see them.