Playa Flamenco is a crescent of white sand a mile long on the north coast of Culebra, a small island off the east coast of Puerto Rico, in a bay of turquoise water with nothing behind it but low green hills, and at its western end two rusted Sherman tanks sit half-sunk in the sand, the remains of a naval firing range that the islanders drove off the beach, on an island reached by a ten-seat propeller plane or the ferry from Fajardo. The tanks were the targets, towed here for the ships and aircraft of the US Navy to shoot at from 1936 until 1975, when the people of Culebra, who did not wait for Washington, protested and sat on the beaches until the Navy left, and one of the hulks is now painted in graffiti with the surf washing around its tracks; the sand runs a full mile from the tanks to the scrub headland at the other end, walked before the day boats land, with the reef at either end where the sand gives way to volcanic rock, gathering parrotfish, sergeant majors and the occasional ray in shallow water. The name is Spanish for flamingo, for the birds that once fed in the lagoon behind the beach.
The peninsula at the end of the beach is closed, and between 30,000 and 40,000 pairs of sooty terns nest on it, so the sky over the headland churns with them until the broods head out to sea in September, and leatherbacks haul out to nest on the island's north-facing beaches from April to June, Flamenco among them, with hawksbills laying into the autumn and the nests staked where they fall. The island has a few thousand people, one town, and a campground on the beach where the tents stand under the palms, with the kiosks selling fried food at the entrance and the crowds thinning after the last ferry. Playa Flamenco is a beach the Navy shot at, and the islanders took it back.