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Collection XIII · 13 cities

Wild Shores

Coastlines where the interest is not the beach club but the geology: reefs, volcanic sand, whale migrations, cliffs with paths along them and water cold enough to matter. Bring boots as well as a towel.

A coast stays wild for a reason, and the reason is almost never that nobody found it.

Usually something made building impossible or illegal. Big Sur has no room: the Santa Lucia range drops into the Pacific, the single road is closed by landslides most years, and California has restricted development on the strip since 1962. The Cinque Terre's terraces are held up by seven thousand kilometres of dry-stone wall on slopes too steep for a machine, so the villages could not grow if they wanted to. Lofoten sits above the Arctic Circle where the Gulf Stream keeps the water open but the cliffs leave a few metres of shelf, and the fishing rorbuer are built on stilts because there is nothing else to build on.

Elsewhere the protection is deliberate. Formentera caps visitor vehicles in summer; Jeju is a UNESCO biosphere reserve; Hermanus banned boats from approaching the whales that come to calve in its bay, so the watching is done from the cliff path on foot.

And a third group is wild because the sea is: Dakhla on the Atlantic edge of the Sahara, Salalah where the monsoon turns a desert green for three months a year, El Nido and Krabi in karst archipelagos that no road can cross.

These are not undeveloped coasts waiting for their turn. Each is a place where geography, law or weather has made the usual sequence impossible, and that is the whole interest.

No Room to Build · 4
USA, CA

Big Sur

The Ragged Coast
The Santa Lucia mountains drop straight into the Pacific with no shelf between them, and until Highway 1 was…
Italy

Cinque Terre

Five Villages on the Cliff
The terraces that make agriculture possible here are retained by dry-stone walls which, laid end to end, would…
Norway

Lofoten / Reine

Peaks Straight from the Sea
The Lofoten wall stands two hundred kilometres inside the Arctic Circle, where granite peaks drop directly into…
Portugal

Funchal / Madeira

Madeira's Amphitheatre
Funchal climbs a bowl of terraces from the harbour to eight hundred metres, and the fortified wine that carries…
Protected on Purpose · 4
Spain

Formentera

The Last Balearic
Formentera can only be reached by boat from Ibiza, which is the single fact that has kept it as it is: no…
South Korea

Jeju

Island of the Haenyeo
Jeju is a shield volcano with Korea's highest peak at its centre and a UNESCO-listed lava tube system beneath…
South Africa

Hermanus

Whales from the Cliff
Southern right whales come into Walker Bay to calve between June and November, close enough to the cliffs that…
Australia

Byron Bay

Australia's Eastern Point
Cape Byron is the mainland's most easterly point, and the town behind it went from whaling station and abattoir…
Where the Sea Is Wild · 5
Morocco

Dakhla

Kitesurf on the Sahara
A forty-kilometre lagoon lies between the dunes and the ocean here, with flat water, three hundred windy days…
Oman

Salalah

The Khareef Monsoon
From late June to September the khareef brings cloud, drizzle and twenty-five degrees to the Dhofar coast…
Philippines

El Nido

Lagoons of Palawan
El Nido faces the Bacuit archipelago, forty-five islands of Jurassic limestone rising sheer from shallow water…
Thailand

Krabi

Limestone Drama
The Andaman karst reaches its most theatrical here: railay is a peninsula reachable only by longtail boat, with…
Brazil

Florianópolis

Island of Forty Beaches
Florianópolis occupies an island settled by Azorean fishermen in the 1740s, and their lace-making villages…
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