The Pink Beach

The Spiaggia Rosa owes its fame to a colour that seems improbable on a Mediterranean shore: a soft pink tint in the sand of Cala di Roto, a small bay on the south-eastern side of Budelli, one of the islands of the La Maddalena archipelago off the northern tip of Sardinia.

The colour is biological. Mixed into the sand are minute fragments of coral and mollusc shells and, above all, the skeletons of two marine organisms: the bryozoan Miriapora truncata and the foraminifer Miniacina miniacea, which live on the sea bed offshore. Waves break the remains apart and wash them ashore, where they mix with the quartz grains and give the beach its rosy hue. Because the effect depends on a slow, steady supply of these fragments, it is easily lost: in the decades when the beach became famous, uncontrolled removal of sand by visitors dulled the colour.

Budelli became widely known after Michelangelo Antonioni filmed on the island for his 1964 film Red Desert. The island, about 1.6 square kilometres in area and rising to 87 metres at Monte Budello, has also yielded prehistoric cave paintings, pottery from the third millennium BC and Roman ceramics. When La Maddalena National Park was established in 1994, Budelli and its beach were placed in the park's zone of strictest protection. The island's private ownership became a national story in 2013, when its sale to a New Zealand businessman was contested; after three years of legal proceedings the Italian state took Budelli into public ownership. For more than thirty years, from 1989 until 2021, the island also had a lone caretaker, Mauro Morandi, who lived there alone.

Getting there

Budelli lies in the La Maddalena archipelago in the Strait of Bonifacio and can be reached only by sea; boat excursions around the archipelago leave from La Maddalena, from Palau and from the Costa Smeralda. Olbia is about 41 km away. Figari Sud-Corse Airport (FSC) in Corsica is slightly closer in a straight line but lies across the strait; the practical airport is Olbia Costa Smeralda (OLB), about 44 km away.