Dakhla Lagoon is a bay of waist-deep water 37 kilometres long penned behind a peninsula of Saharan dunes on the Atlantic coast of Western Sahara, where the trade wind arrives over the dune wall nearly every afternoon without bringing waves, and it has become one of the gentlest places on Earth to learn to kitesurf, with eelgrass flats that feed 20,000 wintering waders and a white dune that becomes an island at high tide. The lagoon is current-free and shallow over most of its length, so that when a beginner falls they stand up, and the kite camps on the peninsula run on the wind, which clears the dunes and drops onto the water almost every afternoon, hardening past 25 knots at midsummer while the sand bar keeps the surface flat; across the bay the Duna Blanca pours a slope of pale sand straight into the water, and at high water it stands as an island with the lagoon wrapped around it. The town of Dakhla at the tip of the peninsula was Villa Cisneros, a Spanish fort that served as a refuelling stop for the French airmail pilots flying south to Dakar, one lonely fort on an empty coast.
At low tide the bay drains into mudflats and eelgrass meadows, and the winter birds arrive to feed, more than 20,000 dunlin, red knot and bar-tailed godwit with rafts of gulls and several hundred greater flamingos, best seen on a falling tide, and the bay holds the northernmost population of the Atlantic humpback dolphin, a critically endangered animal found only on this coast, which may already be gone. A short walk over the peninsula reaches the ocean side, where local anglers plant their rods on the rocks and wait out the swell, and the cold, plankton-heavy water that makes a wetsuit necessary also grows oysters sold on European menus. Sand tracks run inland into the empty Río de Oro, hours without another vehicle. Dakhla is wind without waves in a bay of the Sahara, and the kites have found it.