Shoal Bay East

Shoal Bay East is the beach Anguilla puts on its postcards, and for once the picture undersells it. This is close to two miles of powder white sand, so fine and pale it throws the turquoise water into an almost unreal glow, with a reef offshore that keeps the shallows calm and the snorkelling honest. Slow travellers come here for the simplest pleasures, a long swim, a walk to the empty end, and the kind of light that makes you stop talking. It deserves its reputation as one of the finest beaches in the region, and it is the obvious first stop on any island that takes its sand this seriously.

The honest read is about where you stand on it. The western end, where the bars, the sunbeds and the small lots sit, is lovely but it is also where the day visitors land, and by late morning that stretch fills with rented loungers and a sociable hum. Walk east and the crowd thins to almost nothing within a few hundred steps, leaving you the wild, undeveloped half that is the real reward. Because the bay faces the open Atlantic side of the island, it can also catch drifting sargassum seaweed in the warmer months and a little swell on a windy day, and there are no lifeguards, so read the water and treat conditions as typical rather than promised.

Use it the way the early risers do. Come for a morning swim while the sand is cool and the water is glass, snorkel out over the reef toward the rocky eastern point where the fish gather, and save the middle of the day for a slow grilled lunch and a rum punch at one of the barefoot bars. Then walk east, past the last umbrella, until it is just you, the sea grape and the birds. If you want that solitude from the start, the wilder coves further east such as Savannah Bay and Captains Bay trade the bars for genuine emptiness, and they are where this beach sends anyone chasing quiet.