World rights reserved. No part of this website may be reproduced in any form whatsoever without the express written consent of JMB Communications. We vigorously defend our copyrights. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Skip Navigation. E-mail Print. This article is from reader Mikey D. So let's just enjoy as much or as little of it as there is and not worry about it.
Most of us know that experience walking on darker colored sand on a hot day, it can be quite uncomfortable and make beach shoes a necessity. This cool beach sand is not unique to Siesta Key, but it is relatively rare further north in the U. You might know how to enjoy it, but many still wonder where the white sand of Siesta Key comes from and how it stays so cool.
Most beaches are made up of mixed materials — sand, gravel, pebbles, rock, coral, and seashells — and are constantly changing in composition. This is what gives beaches their different colors.
Beaches come in a variety of shades and colors: white, black, tan, yellow, and red, among others. However, some beaches are uniform in their composition. Volcanic activity on the coastlines of Hawaii, Iceland, and New Zealand, for example, has created black beaches from the dark-colored debris that erupted. The beach had for years been used as a dump for spoil from a neighboring pumice quarry—hence its unreal, and not very attractive, snowy-white appearance.
The rich, creamy-white beaches that are the trademark of the Caribbean islands are usually a mix of two kinds of sand: the ivory-colored calcareous variety the broken-down skeletal remains of dead corals and black, brown, or gray detrital sand the result of the weathering of the island's rock.
Grains of detrital sand can add subtlety and interest to the color of a coral beach, like dots on a pointillist painting, but of course the more of it there is, the less white the overall effect will be. The first is from the cluster of uninhabited islets confusingly known as the Tobago Cays part of the Grenadines, and nothing to do with Tobago. Each morning, an armada of yachts and excursion boats anchors there so that their occupants can spend the day feasting on the colors of sand, reef, and sea—exceptional even by Caribbean standards.
So intense is the upward glow from the sea that the circling gulls appear to have bright turquoise underbellies, an effect that seems to create a strange new species.
My sand sample from the Tobago Cays is of powdery coral spiked with minute gray dots of granite, the consistency of finely ground pepper. My second exhibit is from the even tinier Grenadines islet of Mopion—an isolated sand shoal just a four-minute speedboat ride from the private resort island of Petit St. Richardson , and erected a single thatched umbrella on its central point, making it look just like the castaway island of a million comic strips.
His guests on PSV take turns being speedboated off to Mopion and left there with a well-stocked hamper for an hour or two of Crusoic fantasy.
The sand is a micron or so coarser than that of the Tobago Cays, but it is an even more homogeneous creamy white. The most pristine sand sample, however, is from long, low, dusty Anguilla, the Caribbean island most envied for the number and quality of its beaches.
Anguilla Life , the island's magazine, lists no fewer than thirty-nine of them, plus an extra half dozen on the outer cays. The beaches are of all kinds: There is the long, lonely wilderness of Savannah Bay, its beach a sculpture park of sun-bleached flotsam; there is the manicured expanse of Mead's Bay, overlooked by the island's swankiest hotel Malliouhana and classiest restaurant Blanchard's ; there are a dozen little crescent beaches, of which Cove Bay is the prettiest; there are the working beaches of Sandy Ground and Island Harbour, used as tourist hangouts as well as for commercial fishing.
And that's not even to mention Anguilla's two showpiece beaches, Shoal Bay in the northeast and Rendezvous Bay in the southwest. These two famous beaches differ markedly in style. Rendezvous is a long, curving ribbon of sand held in the protective arms of a two-and-a-half-mile-long bay.
Being on the island's gentler, Caribbean side, it is calmer, shallower, and warmer than its Atlantic rival. Shoal Bay's beach, by contrast, is broad and straight, except where it bends around Shoal Point, a low, sandy headland that visually divides the beach in two.
When the trade winds are blowing, Shoal Bay can become distinctly breezy, although its offshore reefs reduce ocean swells to innocent ripples. But the crucial difference between the two bays is the sand. Though it's beautifully fine in texture, the sand on Rendezvous is an unremarkable pale gold. Shoal Bay's sand, by contrast, is truly amazing: Not only is it as white as coral sand can ever be, but mixed into it are tiny fragments of pure white shell. The effect of wind on this mixture is to bring the shell fragments to the surface, where they catch the sun and add a distinctive sheen to the entire beach.
The shell content makes the sand feel rather coarse, but without a doubt it is the whitest sand I found anywhere in the Caribbean, and I have a little heap of it in front of me to prove it. Of course, more goes into the making of a world-class beach than the color of its sand. One of Shoal Bay's other attractions is the way it manages to feel alive and animated without being in the least crowded or overbuilt. Uncle Ernie's, an archetypal shanty beach bar, is the focus.
A painted sign records how it was "spontaneously relocated" last year by Hurricane Luis, but it was rebuilt with astonishing speed and, in its dazzling new red, green, blue, and white color scheme, is now more enjoyable than ever. Uncle Ernie's apart, Anguilla is richly endowed with other excellent beach bars and restaurants, among them Roy's, Smitty's, Johnno's, Scilly Cay, and Palm Grove, to mention just the few I had the stamina to sample.
The Caribbean's highest density of beach bars, however, is to be found just a short sail west of Anguilla in the British Virgin Islands. You wouldn't immediately think of the sandy bay of Great Harbour, Jost van Dyke, British Virgin Islands, as one of the world's great beaches, although it is of a kind that I very much enjoy a true working beach that also serves as the little town's Main Street.
In the middle is a jetty with a customs post from which a ferry departs each morning for the mighty metropolis of St. At another jetty, men endlessly unload cases of beer, which, as we shall see, is Jost van Dyke's principal item of trade. On the beach itself, fishermen lazily check out their dinghies and lobster cages. A drooping volleyball net is strung between the palms, although it seems improbable that anyone would have the energy to play.
Along the back of the beach are assorted examples of the island's major industry: beach bars. The entire island has a population of only , yet there were, at last count, twelve bars—one for every eleven inhabitants. During my travels in search of great beaches, I have, needless to say, had ample opportunity to reflect on the nature of beach bars. At one extreme is Australia, where beach-worship is the national religion, with such a thicket of laws and regulations that informal beach bars are nonexistent.
Australians are therefore obliged to bring their own supplies—hence the iconic role of the "Esky" cooler in Australian life. At the other extreme is Mexico, where seaside villages sprout entire suburbs of beach palapas simple thatched shelters , which, on weekends and holidays, act as communal eateries for the entire locality and anyone else who wants to join.
In between are beach bars in many different styles, particular favorites of mine being Greek beach tavernas and the partying plages of St-Tropez. My ideal beach bar, of whatever nationality, needs to fill certain requirements.
White Sand. These crazy white, make-you-melt sands in the Caribbean and Mexico are made of eroded limestone and may contain coral and shell fragments, in addition to other organic or organically derived fragmental material. Some sands contain magnetite, chlorite, glauconite or gypsum. Other shockingly white, heaven-on-earth beaches are made up primarily of quartz, which is a light-colored mineral. Here are a few sugar-white beaches that you simply must put on your Bucket List.
John, and Nassau, Bahamas. No matter the color of the sand, the beach is always sunsational. Pink Sand Beach, Bahamas, photo by: instagram.
Pink Sand.
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