Cape Verde
Santa Maria
Kites carve the trade wind; the morning catch sells straight off the wooden pier.
The trade wind arrives before your first coffee, filling kite after kite above the bay. At the wooden pier the fishing boats nose in early, and the catch is cleaned and sold where it lands, metres from the sunbeds.
Santa Maria was a fishing village on Sal's southern tip before it became Cape Verde's busiest resort town, and both lives continue side by side. Eight kilometres of pale sand run from the pier towards Ponta Preta, warm enough to swim most of the year, and winter trade winds blow steady enough that Kite Beach draws kitesurfers from across the Atlantic. The pier is the town's true centre: fish landed, cleaned and sold in the early morning, swimmers off the end by noon. Behind the beach frontage a grid of Creole restaurants, bars and water-sports schools takes over, where the menu is cachupa, grilled tuna and whatever the pier supplied.
Couple
Walk the sand towards Ponta Preta until the resort noise thins, then come back for charcoal-grilled fish with your feet still bare.
Friends
Wind sports by day, a pier sunset, then a slow tour of the Creole grid; the town is built for groups with energy.
Family
The town shallows are gentle on calm days and flagged when they are not; the pier's fish landing is free theatre, and older children can take beginner kite lessons in season.
- Eight kilometres of sand stretch from the Santa Maria pier towards Ponta Preta.
- Steady winter trade winds make Kite Beach one of the Atlantic's dependable kitesurfing arenas.
- The wooden pier is a working fish landing, busiest in the early morning.
- Santa Maria carries Sal's broadest choice of restaurants, water-sports schools and rooms.
PalmBeach grills fresh fish and lobster over natural charcoal on the sand, with cachupa rica on its Cape Verdean tasting.
For breakfast, hunt down cachupa guisada, the fried morning version of the national stew, topped with an egg.
Lefkada
Greece
White cliffs plunge into water so absurdly turquoise it looks digitally altered from every angle.
La Maddalena Archipelago
Italy
Pink granite islands in water so transparent boats appear to hover above the sandy seabed.
Tamarindo
Costa Rica
Sunset surf sessions where pelicans dive-bomb the lineup and howler monkeys heckle from shore.
German Channel
Palau
A reef passage dynamited by German colonists for phosphate cargo, now a manta ray highway.
Cova Crater
Cape Verde
A perfectly round caldera floored with crop terraces, invisible until the rim, gone again in cloud.
São Filipe
Cape Verde
A hundred pastel sobrados crowd the clifftop above a beach of jet-black volcanic sand.
Pico do Fogo
Cape Verde
Loose black scree all the way to a steaming crater rim 2,829 metres above the Atlantic.
Ribeira da Torre
Cape Verde
Sugarcane ripens under black basalt towers in a gorge that ends at a waterfall pool.