Seven Mile Beach

Seven Mile Beach runs the length of Negril Bay on the western tip of Jamaica, from the Bloody Bay end in the north to the point where the sand stops and the limestone cliffs of the West End begin. It is closer to six and a half kilometres than to seven miles, and it faces west, which is the single most important fact about it.

Its reputation was made in the 1970s, when Negril was the cheap and unbuilt end of Jamaica and the beach filled with people staying in wooden cabins. What followed was development, but of an unusual kind: local planning kept buildings below the palm line, so the shore never acquired the wall of towers that changed comparable beaches elsewhere in the Caribbean. The sunset, watched from the sand with a drink, became the thing Negril sells.

The shore is fine pale coral sand with a reef offshore that flattens most of the swell, leaving calm, warm, shallow water with a gradual entry. Sea grass appears in patches and is cleared in front of the hotels and not elsewhere. Erosion is a live problem: this beach has lost significant width over recent decades and parts of it are now noticeably narrower than the photographs suggest.

Development is continuous but low. Hotels, all-inclusives, bars and craft vendors run the whole length, and the beach is legally public — you can walk it end to end, though sunbeds belong to whichever property set them out. Vendors approach visitors regularly, which some find sociable and others find wearing; a polite refusal is understood and repeated often.

Seven miles of sand, a sunset industry at the western end, and an erosion problem that Jamaica has been arguing about for two decades — groynes, sand-pumping and a shoreline that has retreated measurably. The beach is public to the high-water mark and the vendors are persistent and generally good-humoured; agree a price first.