Dakhla Lagoon is a bay thirty-seven kilometres long on the Atlantic coast of Western Sahara, penned in behind a wall of desert dunes. The water inside is waist-deep for most of its width, with no current, and the trade wind comes over the dunes and drops onto it almost every afternoon. That combination is why people fly here to learn kitesurfing: the wind arrives on schedule, the sand bar keeps the swell out, and when you fall you stand up. Schools line the shore south of town, and most beginners are gliding within days. The water is cold for the latitude, pushed up from the deep by a constant upwelling, so a wetsuit is part of the kit even in the Sahara. That same cold water feeds everything else here. Oysters are farmed on trestles in the shallows and shucked at shacks on the bank, with the kites going over.
Across the bay the Duna Blanca pours a slope of pale sand straight into the water, and at high tide it stands as an island with the lagoon wrapped round it; at low tide the flats are firm enough to drive. Those flats are the other half of the place. When the water drains off them, eelgrass meadows come clear and the winter birds arrive to feed: dunlin, red knot and bar-tailed godwit in their thousands, gulls in dense rafts, greater flamingos standing pink against the sand. Nothing here is fenced, and you walk the edge of it. The bay also holds the northernmost Atlantic humpback dolphins, a species that lives nowhere but this coast, and sightings have thinned so far that researchers do not know whether any are left. Inland, sand tracks run off the peninsula into open Sahara, where hardpan flats reach the horizon and hours pass without another vehicle. Ten minutes' walk over the dunes puts you on the ocean side, where the swell hammers the ledges — which is when you understand what the sand is holding off the flat water behind you.