Hormuz is an island in the Strait of Hormuz, off the southern coast of Iran, that is not made of rock at all but of salt, a dome pushed up from below and stained in some seventy mineral colours, with a beach whose sand is so red that it tints the waves. Salt is restless: lighter than the rock around it, it keeps creeping slowly upward and outward, carrying up with it the minerals that paint the island, iron for the reds, and the dry washes of the Rainbow Valley run past slopes stacked band over band in red, ochre, yellow and violet. Red Beach is the picture, sand of deep iron-red at the water's edge where your footprints leave dark crimson tracks and the surf runs pink; the red earth is clean enough that islanders use it as a spice on bread and fish. A stream of salt water runs up to the caves of the Salt Goddess, where crystallised salt coats the walls in ripples and folds that shimmer in the light, and around the shore the ground shifts from red to ochre to silver-black sand from one cove to the next.
The island sits at the mouth of the Gulf, and an old saying held that if the world were a ring, Hormuz would be its jewel: its port was once among the richest trading places on Earth, and on the northern point the Portuguese built a fort of red stone in 1507 to hold the strait, whose bastions, water cisterns and ruined chapel still stand over the water. The island is circled by tuk-tuk or bicycle in a day, past mineral cliffs and mud coves, and the one village has rooms in its houses. The coloured earth has become an art material: villagers and visiting artists rake its powdered soils into enormous ground carpets laid out on the shore, and domed houses in the island's colours were built for the village in 2020. Hormuz is an island made of salt and painted by it, and the beach is red because the ground is.