Ciao, people of HIVE!
After telling you about my trip to Sicily, let’s return to Sardinia for a while. I want to show you a place very close to my home, one that I always visit with great excitement.
It’s a wonderful beach with fine, white sand, which gathers into dunes reaching up to thirty meters high. The sea is crystal clear, but the beach is often swept by the maestrale wind blowing from the northwest. This makes the water cloudy and creates very high waves.
On calm days, it’s lovely to come here for a swim, but on windy days it’s just as beautiful, because you witness the spectacle of nature stirring and becoming agitated, unleashing its wild force right before your eyes.
A note, in case you're wondering. The photos you're seeing in this article have not been edited. I haven’t altered the colors, played with shadows or contrasts or made any modifications of any kind. What you see is exactly the result of what I captured with my Canon 750D and, more generally, the true experience of a sunset on this coastline.
Is Arenas Biancas
This is the name of the place in Sardinian. As Italian and Spanish speakers will easily understand, it simply means the white sands, referring to the dunes that rise above the sea, resembling sugar mountains.
It’s connected to the beach of Porto Pino, probably the most popular beach for tourists in this area; and it’s not far from Tuerredda and Porto Tramatzu, which are undoubtedly the two most beautiful beaches in southern Sardinia – definitely in my top 3 of this area.
That afternoon, a typical autumn day, my friend and I had just finished working. We had nothing planned, so we decided to take a walk on the beach to watch the sunset from the dunes.
We arrived at Is Arenas Biancas around seven in the evening.
Yeah, it was seven in the evening. In Sardinia, the September sun sets around eight, so we arrived an hour earlier, giving ourselves some time for a walk through the dunes.
The place was truly eerie when we arrived. There was no one around, and all we could hear was the rustling of the wind between the dunes and the music of the waves crashing on the shore.
We walked for a while in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I was exploring the vastness of the space. When a beach is crowded and noisy, it’s hard to be amazed by the scale of the landscape. But when you walk on an empty beach, you really feel alone, small, insignificant.
And yet, I love that feeling. It’s like it helps me to breathe for real.
The temperature was still pleasant, so we couldn’t resist and went for a swim. I remember the water was very cold. We didn’t stay in for too long, maybe just fifteen or twenty minutes. Then we returned to the shore, dried off and went to explore the dunes.
This is what I meant when I spoke of vastness. Looking at the photo, the landscape doesn’t seem that expansive, but notice how small the lifeguard tower appears now, even though it’s about four or five meters tall.
Even the boats seem to grow smaller and more distant.
As we walked between the dunes, the sun began to set. The evening was drawing near. Despite the growing twilight, we decided to stay seated on the dunes to watch the sunset. The clouds, the colors, the eternal poetry of the sea and the music of the waves... every detail was like a brushstroke on a magnificent painting. We couldn't look at each other and simply say: "It's late, let's go home." And so, we stayed.
It’s impossible for me to describe the peace of those moments, or the overwhelming power with which the beauty of nature filled my heart. As we walked back to the car, I wished I could never leave. I felt so complete and happy that I could have died in that moment.
As we were leaving, I stopped to take a photo of a small lagoon near the beach of Is Arenas Biancas. This is also the only road you can use to reach the dunes, as far as I know; the alternative is to walk three or four kilometers on the sand, along Porto Pino beach.
This lagoon is also home to a colony of flamingos, and I might share some photos of them in a future post. For now, I just wanted to offer you one last moment of color and beauty.
I also want to confess that writing this post made me very happy and emotional. I relived those moments of joy spent with a friend I haven’t seen in a long time, as he has since left Sardinia; but I also met another person I haven’t seen in a long time - the version of myself from that period, who all of a sudden had to change, to evolve, and who is still fighting to rediscover the carefree, peaceful and enthusiastic spirit of a child during vacation days.
Thank you for being here, for your support and for your time. Feel free to share anything you'd like in the comments.
Otherwise, see you soon on the road ✌️🤠 [//]:# ([//]:# (!worldmappin 38.94988 lat 8.61979 long d3scr))