Eagle Beach is where nearly everyone photographs Aruba's national tree and gets the tree wrong. The two low trunks leaning seaward over this sand are fofoti (Conocarpus erectus), a buttonwood that needs salt air and grows only at the water's edge. The watapana, the tree the Aruban parliament actually made the national tree, is a different species that grows inland. What the two share is their posture. Trade winds come off the east-northeast almost every day of the year, and over decades they train an exposed crown to grow away from them, so both lean southwest; Arubans call them the island's natural compass. The beach behind the fofoti pair is the widest on the island, a long shelf of white coral sand on the sheltered west coast, backed by low-rise resorts rather than towers, which is why the horizon here stays open. Aruba lies near 12° north, below the corridor the Atlantic hurricanes travel, and no hurricane has made a direct hit in the record.
Sand this wide changes the rhythm of a day. At first light the beach is nearly empty and the sea lies flat, and it takes a full minute to walk from the palapas down to the waterline. By midday the water is a pale, clear green you can wade far into, and the same trade wind that bent the trees is why the heat rarely feels heavy. Between March and September the sand belongs to something else after dark: leatherbacks, the largest turtles alive, haul out to nest, each female returning six to eight times in a season and leaving around 115 eggs a clutch. Volunteers from the Turtugaruba foundation stake and rope every nest they find, and the hatchlings dig their way out from May into November.