A DAY at the Kent seaside should turn into a long holiday and a new life for 50 visitors to Sandwich Bay.

The newcomers are 50 sand lizards and the nature reserve will become home to the threatened species, just reintroduced into the county.

There has been a 90% drop in the numbers of the species in the UK in the last 100 years. Tthey have disappeared from whole counties.

Now, in a partnership between English Heritage and the Herpetological Conservation Trust, around 350 captive-bred young lizards will be relased at seven sites in Kent, Merseywide, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Surrey, Hampshire and Dorset.

The young lizards at the Sandwich and Pegwell Bay National Nature Reserve, managed by Kent Wildlife Trust, are up to six weeks old and about two inches long.

Jim Foster, English Nature's reptile specialist, said: "Putting sand lizards back in Kent has long been an objective of the reintroduction programme, as it brings this threatened species back to an area from where it died out in the 1960s."