Turtle Island

Pulau Serangan

Turtle Island is Pulau Serangan — the small island off Bali's south coast near Sanur, joined to the mainland by a causeway and historically the centre of Bali's turtle-conservation programmes. From a helicopter, five minutes off the Nusa Dua helipad, you see the island as a flat green wedge cut between Benoa Bay and the open Indian Ocean.

The place

What is Turtle Island

Pulau Serangan sits in the shallow water between the Bukit Peninsula and the mainland coast at Sanur. It is small — roughly four square kilometres at the current shoreline — and very flat, never rising more than a few metres above sea level. The island was historically a fishing community with its own temple, Pura Sakenan, which is one of the oldest religious sites on Bali and still draws major pilgrimage festivals on the Balinese 210-day calendar.

The Turtle Island name comes from the 1980s and 1990s, when the island was the centre of a controversial commercial turtle trade and, later, of the conservation response that replaced it. Today several turtle hatchery and rescue operations work on the island, releasing rehabilitated and hatchery-born turtles back into the Lombok Strait. The conservation work continues to be the island's headline attraction for visitors who cross the causeway.

The shoreline changed dramatically in the 1990s when a developer infilled the shallows around the island, expanding it from roughly one square kilometre to its current size and connecting it to the mainland by a fixed causeway. The intended resort never materialised; the reclaimed land has slowly returned to mixed use of fishing villages, conservation, and a small surf break on the south side.

The aerial view

From the air

The Turtle Island overflight is short — under a minute on the outbound leg of the volcano routes — but it shows you the full geography of Benoa Bay in one frame:

The **island's flat, wedge shape** between the bay and the open ocean, with the

The **reef and shallow patterns** around the island — Benoa Bay is one of the

The **outline of the 1990s reclamation** — visible if you know where to look,

The **causeway and the village clusters** — Pura Sakenan's complex shows as a

Timing

Best time for aerial photography

Mid-morning

(8–10 a.m.) — the shallows over Benoa Bay light up in the full

Late afternoon

the island silhouettes against the eastern sky and the

Avoid midday

high sun flattens the water colour and bleaches the

spectrum of turquoise to pale jade. Best for the colour-of-water photographs that Turtle Island is suited for. causeway catches the low light. shallows.

Pair the view