Cove Bay

Saba is a volcano with cliffs all the way round and effectively no beach, and Cove Bay below the airport is one of the few points where a small pool and a patch of shingle let people get into the water from land. A wall of large rocks, cleared from Flat Point to ease the approach to the airport, shields the swimming area from the waves, and sand has been brought in from St. Maarten to make a small artificial beach. Most of the rest of the island's shoreline is cliff.

History

The Flat Point peninsula was formed by a lava flow about 5,000 years ago, and Amerindians lived there between 400 and 800 AD, leaving pottery and conch-shell adzes. In the 17th and 18th centuries it held a sugar and indigo plantation with an indigo boiling house, two wells, one of them at Cove Bay, and houses for enslaved Africans; timber for Hell's Gate was once rowed round to Cove Bay and carried up by donkeys or people, and Saba's airport opened just above the bay in 1963 (Wikipedia, Cove Bay - Saba).

The landscape

• The sheltered pool - a swimming area walled off from the waves by large rocks.
• The shingle - the small patch of stone that stands in for a beach.
• The imported sand - a small artificial beach made with sand from St. Maarten.
• The cliffs - the shoreline everywhere else on the island.

When to go

December to April is drier and calmer. Swell makes the pool unusable at times.

Before you go

This is not a beach in any usual sense and expectations should be low. Swell closes it regularly. The road down is steep and there are no facilities.

Nearby

The airport is above, and Zion's Hill is west.

Key facts