Punta Tegge, the town's own beach, and the best sunset on the island

Overview

Punta Tegge sits on La Maddalena’s own coastline, at the island’s south-west tip, and that is the whole reason to know about it: it is the beach available to anyone staying in the town, with no place to book on the shared excursions that fill the harbour every morning. It is a small beach rather than a grand one, and it does two things the famous coves out in the archipelago cannot. It is easy water — shallow, sandy and calm, the stretch families with small children actually use. And it faces west, which makes it the island’s sunset beach: the one people walk out to at the end of the day rather than the start of it.

The sand and the water

The beach is pale sand, medium-grained and firm underfoot, set into a frame of the big smooth granite slabs that shape this whole coast — the granite is the setting, not the shore you swim off. The bottom stays shallow and sandy well out from the water’s edge, and the water is calm, which is what makes this the town’s family beach rather than a swimmers’ cove: children can stand a long way out, and there is no scramble over rock to get in. It is a modest beach and it does not pretend otherwise — the turquoise-over-white postcard belongs to the outer islands, and what you get here is clear, easy, ordinary Mediterranean water a walk from where you are sleeping. The granite around it is worth the climb for the view back over the water, which is where the evening crowd ends up.

Getting there

Punta Tegge is on the same island as the town, so none of the boat trips out to the archipelago apply. The route is west out of the centre, along the road that runs down the island’s south-western side towards Padule and the tip, and the last kilometre or so of that road is the approach to the beach itself. On foot it is a walk of well under an hour, flat enough at either end but with the usual rises of an island road in between; a bicycle or a scooter, both easy to hire in town, turns it into a few minutes and is the sensible choice in the middle of the day in July or August. There is free parking at the beach for anyone who has a vehicle.

Practicalities

Access is free and unticketed, as it is on every Italian beach, and unusually for this island you do not have to arrive self-sufficient: there is a snack point and bar behind the sand doing sandwiches and simple plates, along with toilets, and in high season the place keeps going into the evening. Shade is the thing to bring rather than food — the sand has little natural cover, and the granite holds the afternoon heat. The season is the archipelago’s own, roughly late spring to early autumn; in July and August the beach is genuinely busy, and outside those weeks it empties out. Come for the last two hours of daylight if you come once: this is the island’s sunset shore, and the low sun on the granite is the reason residents walk out here rather than swim off the harbour front.