Saly Portudal

Saly Portudal is the resort's historic core: this is where the first hotels opened at the end of the 1970s, on the beach that still carries the name Portuguese navigators left behind — Porto de Ale. Today the sand is lined for two kilometres with hotels, apartments and restaurants, separated from the sea by rock armour along part of its length: the shoreline is retreating, the sea walls are recent, and the sand moves from one season to the next.

The day follows an unchanging order. Mornings belong to walkers and to the sellers laying out sand paintings, necklaces and pareos straight onto the beach — they will all greet you, they will be back tomorrow, and a polite no works perfectly well. At noon you eat fish at the craft market or in the beachfront restaurants; the afternoon means swimming, pirogues and fishing trips; at six everyone watches the sun fall into the sea because there is nothing else to do at that hour.

In the evening the quarter lives on its terraces and live-music bars, until midnight for families and considerably later for everyone else. Everyday shops — mini-market, pharmacy, cash machines, quad rental — are grouped along the main road, five minutes' walk away.

This is the part of Saly that needs a car least: you arrive, you put the bags down and you move on foot or by horse-drawn cart. What you will not find is absolute quiet, or a piece of beach to yourself.

Practicalities: two mini-markets, a pharmacy and a cash machine that works most of the time on the main road. Restaurants take cards, almost no shop does, and neither the pirogue men nor the cart drivers: keep cash. For swimming, the sea is calm in the morning and picks up in the afternoon with the north-westerly; there are no lifeguards outside the hotels. And if you are coming between 20 December and 5 January, book months ahead: it is the one period when Saly is genuinely full.