Bahia Honda was recommended to us by an American guy on our flight over from Europe. So when we ran out of things to do in Key West after only one day we thought we’d better check it out.
My expectations of Bahia Honda were a little confused. I knew from our guidebook and the guy on the plane that the beach wasn’t exactly huge but, according to the in-flight magazine, it was rated amongst Conde Nast’s best US beaches.
Arriving at Bahia Honda the beach itself was easily overlooked, as your eye is drawn to the remains of the old road bridge. You can’t help but head up the severed bridge from where you have a great view of the turquoise waters, and the feat of civil engineering of Highway 1 linking together what appear to be little more than sand bars. In spite of the lack of creature comforts – this is just a road and a bridge that stops dead – it is mesmerising to sit as if on a high board watching the wheeling pelicans in the warm sea breeze.
Only as you turn to walk back down the road to ground level do you see from this vantage point what a jewel Bahia Honda is. Even on a slightly overcast day this narrow strip of land sparkled, a lush core of greenery surrounded by a skirt of bleached white sand set in a turquoise/jade sea.
Not being a beach babe, nor it being quite the season for it, the view of the beach was as good as it got for us. We walked down the seaward beach, a slender strip of sand narrowing to 2m in places, but found the going hard in a bank of prickly storm-tossed seaweed seemingly full of rotting fish. Where we could escape the smell, we were tormented by sand flies. With little to do but keep moving, we exhausted Bahia Honda’s charms within a couple of hours. I appreciate my description of the beach itself is not a particularly enticing scene, but on balance I would rather have seen this deserted out of season ‘real’ beach, than a groomed ‘artificial’ beach lined with beached sunbathers.