Porto Santo Beach

Porto Santo lies forty kilometres north-east of Madeira and is reached by ferry in two and a half hours or by a short flight. Its southern coast is a single beach of nine kilometres — which matters because Madeira, the main island, has almost no natural sand at all.

The sand is prescribed. Porto Santo's sand is biogenic, formed largely from marine organisms and calcium carbonate, and it has been studied by Portuguese universities and used in a documented therapeutic practice — psammotherapy — in which patients are buried in hot sand for rheumatic and orthopaedic conditions. The practice is supervised, has clinical protocols, and is one of the reasons the island markets itself as it does.

The beach is fine pale gold, shelving gently into clear Atlantic water that is warm by Atlantic standards, in the low twenties in late summer. It runs the whole southern coast with almost nothing built on the sand itself. The island is dry, low and windswept, and the interior is bare volcanic hill. The island is dry and low where Madeira is steep and green, and the flight between them takes fifteen minutes across a climate boundary.

Christopher Columbus lived here in the 1470s, married the daughter of the island's first governor, and a house associated with him is a museum. Development is a small town, Vila Baleira, and a handful of hotels. Madeira's own bathing is done from platforms and lava pools, which is why Porto Santo exists in the Madeiran imagination as the beach.

Nine kilometres of sand next to an island that has almost none, and a sand cure with clinical protocols behind it. Porto Santo is dry, low and windy where Madeira is steep and green, and the fifteen-minute flight between them crosses a climate boundary. Columbus lived on the island in the 1470s and married the first governor's daughter; the house is a museum in Vila Baleira.