Eagle Beach is the widest sand in Aruba, and the walk from the road to the water is long enough to feel in your calves. The sand is coral and shell ground fine, and cool underfoot at noon. The seabed shelves so gently that you can wade a long way out and still be waist-deep, the water clear enough to show your feet. Two low fofoti trees lean over that sand, and they are the most photographed thing on the island. They lean southwest because decades of trade wind have pushed them, and their exposed roots grip the sand like knuckles. Early on you can stand under the crown alone; by mid-morning there is a queue of cameras for the same frame. Almost everyone calls them divi-divi, which was never the name of a tree at all. It was the trade name of another tree's twisted pods, heavy with tannin, which Aruba once shipped abroad by the ton for tanning leather.
The beach has a night shift. From March to September leatherback turtles haul out on this sand after dark to lay. They are the biggest turtles alive, two metres long and past five hundred kilos, and the only ones that carry no hard shell: their backs are ridged sheets of oily cartilage instead of bone. That flexible body lets them dive beyond a thousand metres after jellyfish, deeper than any other reptile, and they come ashore for one thing only. Volunteers stake and rope every nest they find, so through the summer the beach carries taped squares over eggs that take about two months. From May into November the hatchlings dig out and run for the sea, sometimes in daylight. They steer by the brightest line on the horizon, which is meant to be the water; a phone screen on the sand is enough to send them the wrong way, so the beach goes dark for them.