S'Amarador

S'Amarador is the large beach of the Mondragó natural park, on the Santanyí coast. White sand, clear water and pine woods right to the edge: you reach it along a cobbled path between post-and-rail fences, and that already tells you what kind of place this is.

The outline recorded in OpenStreetMap measures a hundred and eighty metres from end to end, in an open cove of sand —not gravel— wedged between two arms of low rock covered in pine. It has a lifeguard, on a seasonal timetable: ten to six from May to June and from September to October, and until half past seven in July and August. What it does not have, because it lies inside a protected area, is anything that usually comes with an urban beach: no camping, no fires, no smoking, no dogs.

It is inside the Mondragó natural park, and that is the whole argument: what lies behind the sand is protected pine woods, not a line of hotels. On a coast where almost every good cove has a development above it, a hundred-and-eighty-metre beach with a park behind it is a neighbour that is not going to change. Three hundred and seventy metres away as the crow flies, in the other arm of the inlet, is Cala Mondragó, the park's other beach.