Santa Maria Beach

Santa Maria is at the southern tip of Sal, one of the eastern Cape Verde islands, four hundred kilometres off the Senegalese coast. The beach runs eight kilometres of pale sand along a flat, dry, treeless island where it rains a few days a year.

The island's history is salt, which is what its name means. Salt pans in a volcanic crater at Pedra de Lume were worked from the seventeenth century and exported to Brazil and Africa; the industry collapsed and tourism replaced it from the 1990s, with an international airport and a resort strip built along this beach. Cape Verde's population is smaller than its diaspora, and the economics of that are visible everywhere on Sal.

The beach is wide and pale with warm water and a shore break, and the wind is constant — this is one of the more reliable kitesurfing and windsurfing destinations in the Atlantic, and Kite Beach north of the town is given over to it. Loggerhead turtles nest along this coast between June and October, and Cape Verde holds one of the largest nesting populations in the world; night patrols and protected sections are in place.

Development is a resort strip north of the town and a working town at the southern end. The pier at Santa Maria is the thing to see: fishing boats land there through the morning and the catch — tuna, wahoo, occasionally shark — is cut up on the pier in front of whoever is watching. Kite Beach north of the town is the wind sports centre, and Boa Vista, an hour away by ferry, has longer and emptier beaches with far fewer people on them.

Go to the pier in the morning. Boats land through the morning and the catch is cut up in front of whoever is standing there, which is more interesting than anything else on Sal. Then the wind, which never stops and is why the island has a kitesurfing economy.