Pointe des Châteaux is where Guadeloupe runs out, and the Atlantic has sawn the last of it into stacks and turrets that look from the water like a ruined castle. The island is really two islands fused into the shape of a butterfly, and this is the eastern tip of the flat wing. Grande-Terre is a slab of coral reef lifted clear of the sea: low, dry, scrubby, with no real rivers, because rain drains straight down through the limestone. Across the bay the other wing, Basse-Terre, catches cloud on its volcano and grows rainforest. You walk out to the point in ten to fifteen minutes over the dunes, with the wind rising the whole way. Sea lies on both sides of you, and the two behave nothing alike. One is a lagoon the trade wind holds pressed flat against its reef; the other is the open Atlantic, arriving with nothing in its way and going off on bare rock. La Désirade sits out on the horizon.
Off the path the old reef-rock is drilled full of shallow pools that fill and drain with the swell, and it is sharp enough to come through a thin sole under your weight. Behind the dunes lie six salt ponds, the largest of them, the Grande Saline, covering some fifteen hectares. Least terns and Wilson's plovers nest along its banks, and a platform on the trail lets you watch them without walking in among them. Offshore, the bare islets of La Roche and L'Éperon hold the archipelago's largest seabird colony: sooty terns in their thousands through early summer, along with bridled terns, noddies and tropicbirds. Caribbean flamingos fed in these ponds once. Hunting finished them here by the 17th century and none have returned, though the water is still exactly what they want. A cross stands on the highest rock and looks as though it always has. The first went up in 1951, wind and salt wore it through, and the ten-metre one raised in 2002 is lit and maintained because ships still steer by it.