The final hundred meters of road test your car's suspension and your commitment. You park in the scrub next to a half-dozen other vehicles—Fiats and Pandas with local plates, a German camper van with bicycles strapped to the back. The path drops through juniper and strawberry trees, their leaves dusty from the dry summer, then spills you onto a beach no more than sixty meters end to end.
“A Teulada cove that exists in the gap between military restriction and tourist development, staying small by geography and circumstance.”
Credit: UnsplashSardinian granite coast and clear water
The sand is fine and pale, studded with fragments of pink granite worn smooth by waves. At the south end, a tumble of boulders creates a natural breakwater; at the north, the beach simply stops where the military coastline begins, marked by faded yellow signs warning against trespass. The water in between is a gradient of turquoise and sapphire, the shallows so clear you can see hermit crabs scuttling across the rippled sand below.
A handful of beachgoers stake out territories—a young couple under a rented umbrella, an older woman doing yoga on a sarong, a father teaching his daughter to snorkel in the knee-deep water. You wade in and the bottom stays sandy for ten meters before the first rocks appear, colonized by green algae and tiny blennies that vanish into cracks at your approach. By early afternoon the breeze kicks up, ruffling the water's surface and bending the wild grasses on the dunes. It's just enough wind to keep you comfortable, not enough to spoil the swimming.
