Los Roques is one of the few coral atolls in the Atlantic, and its lagoon is shallow enough that the colour of the water tells you how deep it is. Some 350 sand cays and islets lie scattered across it, far out from the Venezuelan coast. Pale ivory means a sandbar right under the hull, green means sand or seagrass a few metres down, dark blue means the bottom has dropped away. The skippers crossing the lagoon steer by those colours rather than by anything on a screen. Everything else on the water follows from the same shallowness. The trade winds blow day after day over flats that stay knee-deep and glass-flat for hundreds of metres. That is what put the lagoon among the best kitesurfing water in the Caribbean, for a first lesson as much as for freestyle.
The one village is on Gran Roque, the single rocky island in the group: sand streets, brightly painted guesthouses, a small fishing harbour and no cars, crossed end to end in a quarter of an hour. An old lighthouse stands on the hill behind it, above the whole scattered lagoon. From the beach below, the local boats run out each morning and drop you on a bare cay with shallow water on both sides; at Cayo de Agua a spit of sand runs clear between two islets. You slip off a sandbar out there onto living coral, parrotfish grazing the heads and green turtles crossing the open sand between them, the water clear for tens of metres and the reef more or less your own. Four threatened sea turtles feed and nest across these cays, and the birds have the empty islets to themselves. The same flats are waded at dawn by fly-fishers after bonefish, tarpon and permit. Coming home late, the low sun puts the hill, the lighthouse and the moored masts into black against flat water. In the warm months the flats drain so far that the bonefish feed out there with their tails showing above the surface.