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St Vincent and the Grenadines is a string of stunning cays and a larger rainforested island set in superb in the south-eastern Caribbean. Access is not that easy (mainly via Barbados or other Windward Islands) but once you are there there is excellent sailing and the inter-island travel, mainly by ferry, is easy and fun. Lively islanders, English-speaking, with a delightful, slow, easy island life. Classic Caribbean beaches, isolated coves of white sand and tiny sandy cays, in the Grenadines - St Vincent itself has mainly dark volcanic sand, with some very attractive jungly coves. Much of the tourism is geared to sailing, but land accommodation ranges from private island resorts and the most luxurious villas in the region to small inns and guest houses (there is very little mid-range package tourism). Some cruise tourism with good day trips, also good scuba, pretty stone buildings in Kingstown the capital, gardens and hiking on St Vincent.
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Getting to St Vincent and the Grenadines can be a little complicated. There are no direct flights to the islands from outside the Caribbean and so you will have to make a connection somewhere. One option is to fly via Puerto Rico, from where there are services to St Vincent itself, from where it is an easy trip across on the ferry to Bequia, and to Canouan. Another good option is to choose Barbados (which is well served from both sides of the Atlantic), from where there are excellent ‘share charter’ connections to all the islands in the Grenadines. For services to the Grenadines from Barbados, including ‘share charters’ and air taxi services, see SVG Air.
The Sailing in St Vincent and the Grenadines is some of the best in the Caribbean and the world. If you wish to hire a yacht, bareboat or crewed, we recommend TMM Yacht Charters, who are based in Blue Lagoon in the South of St Vincent.
Bequia
Bequia is a very special island. It is just five miles by two in size (actually the largest of the Grenadines) but it has exceptional charm and an unexpected amount to offer. Its diminutive town, Port Elizabeth, has one of the prettiest and most atmospheric waterfronts in the whole Caribbean, with a small, active centre where the ferries put in, and a line of bars and restaurants that stretch along a shoreside walkway under the palms. In season the bars can be lively, with sailors from the yachts at anchor in the bay, but there is an almost supernatural charm about the place, which makes it lovely to visit at any time of the year. Elsewhere the island has plenty to recommend it too. There is a handful of good restaurants in excellent settings, some lovely remote beaches and beach bars and a strong local life too.
Accommodation on Bequia
None of the hotels on Bequia are large and a couple of them use the best in traditional local architecture, which adds to their charm in an already charming island. They are informal and friendly, offering a lovely, low key getaway. There is also a surprisingly good stock of villas on Bequia. We recommend the following places to stay on Bequia.
Frangipani, Port Elizabeth
A small, well-priced inn with limitless West Indian charm, set on the exceptionally pretty Belmont waterfront on the island of Bequia in the Grenadines. Family-run, the Frangipani is a lovely hideaway but it is also very much part of the activity of the bay.
Bequia Beachfront Villas, Friendship Bay
A collection of self-contained apartments set on the lovely curve of Friendship Bay on the southern shore of Bequia in the Grenadines. Bequia Beachfront Villas have one to four bedrooms, but are all individually decorated, very comfortable have a homely feel.
Getting around Bequia
Bequia is a small island, but it is large enough (and steep enough) to make it worthwhile having a vehicle, particularly if you are staying in a villa. To hire a jeep, fix a taxi or arrange an island tour, contact B&G Jeep Rentals, who offer all of these services.
Accommodaton in other islands
Canouan
Raffles Resort Canouan is a full service resort with superb facilities, including a spa, golf course and a casino. It is first venture of the famous Oriental hotel chain in the Caribbean.
Mayreau
The Saltwhistle Bay Club is nearly as secluded, set on its own bay on the delightfully slumberstruck island of Mayreau.
Petit St Vincent
If it is private island seclusion you would like most of all then there are few places more suitable than Petit St Vincent Resort, a low key but luxury resort set on a private island of just 113 acres.
Boat building is a dying art in the Caribbean, but can still just be seen in some islands. For an article about Caribbean trading boats, see here.
Below is an article about the Grenadines which was first published in the Financial Times.
St Vincent and the Grenadines
by James Henderson
Arriving after dark increases the pleasure of arriving at many Caribbean hotels. Night comes early in the tropics, and as you walk through the garden a profusion of unfamiliar bushes and trees (their trunks sometimes painted white to eight feet) stand etched black in silhouette. In the warm breeze crickets make their scratchy ring and the tree frogs peep shrill and rhythmically.
Young Island, off the south coast of St Vincent, is a particularly spectacular place to arrive at night. As you putter across the two hundred yard channel in the old diesel ferry, the lines of pinpoint lights become knee-high lamps lining the stone pathways. Hidden among the explosive greenery are waterfront and hillside cottages, and palm-thatch gazebos where guests are taking dinner. They are all connected by a network of meandering paths that are throttled by plants.
Lit from beneath, the plants give only a hint of their daytime colour and variety, but next morning you see they are heliconia and banana, fountains of golden palm and ferns, interlaced with flashes of tropical colour--bougainvillea, hibiscus and ginger lily. Palm trunks soar from among them, exploding above in an airburst of fronds.
Young Island captures the feel of an older, more elegant Caribbean; the bright and breezy rooms have no need of air-conditioning; wooden louvres channel the sea-breeze, which is then whipped up by ceiling fans. It is an ideal place to relax, as the Caribbean begins to work on you and to wind you down. Activity is to wade out to the offshore bar or to retire to the two person hammocks. And in the way of the Caribbean, you can be as private as you like, or you can fall in with the other guests, sharing dinner or a yachting trip with easy informality.
St Vincent, a vast volcanic lump mantled with rainforest, where rivers tumble and crash, and the Grenadines, a scattering of smaller, drier islands that stretch south over sixty miles, lie in the southeastern Caribbean. They are that bit more remote, an extra flight, and sometimes a boat trip, beyond the main Caribbean gateways. Perhaps as a consequence they attract a slightly different style of visitor. The Grenadines specialise in that brand of peace that so many Caribbean islands claim to offer: as the flip Caribbean call goes, they are a great place for doing very little. They are easy-going and undeveloped for the Caribbean (though there are some good hotels) and most have a more natural West Indian air (less of the champagne playground of elsewhere). And all this in the strikingly beautiful setting of a gloriously blue Caribbean Sea.
I find myself recommending the Grenadines to people quite often. They stand within sight of one another, but they are surprisingly different and this makes them ideal for island-hopping. They include island resorts with just a few cottages scattered around carefully tended gardens; dozy, barely populated outcrops which have just received electricty; busy islands with picture-postcard prettiness, and in the middle of them the wordly sophistication of Mustique.
You can explore in five-star style, chartering little planes between the luxurious hotels, or you can travel on the MV Snapper, the mail boat, which serves the islands with provisions, and soft drinks, corrugated roofing tin, breeze blocks, and goats, and the mail of course, a couple of times a week. The Snapper is noisy and lively; a good part of island life.
My first port of call was Bequia, an hour's sail from the St Vincent mainland. From the moment you enter Admiralty Bay you can feel the charmed air of Bequia. Its pretty wooden waterfront buildings, just visible in a screen of palm trees, almost nestle. Life proceeds at a dozy Caribbean pace: an occasonal dog, dozing, will cock an eyebrow as you go by, then let out a long breath and doze off again. In fact, there are 5000 islanders, somewhere.
I stayed at the Plantation House, where as the name suggests, the rooms hark back to another age: gingerbread cottages with cane furniture and hanging mosquito nets and a large wooden veranda from which you can contemplate life. It is easy to settle in on Bequia, to feel the intimacy of the small island. The islanders come out at night and mix with the visitors and sailors in the many bars along the shoreline. Part of the fun is to wander along the stone walkway on the waterfront and choose one to stop in.
The Bequian fishermen spend about two weeks in the month over on the island of Mustique, another hour's sail, or more likely ten minutes' flying time, further south. Mustique is of course notorious (a champagne playground, certainly), though recently it seems to have become a little less frivolous and more businesslike. Strangely for an island that seems to owe so little to the West Indies, the island fits into a long-established Caribbean tradition of West Indian charters. Developers have taken leases on the Grenadines for centuries; it is just that they planted Mustique with luxurious villas rather than with the cotton or sugar of times past. The island is run as a company, into which investors buy by purchasing a plot of land (the going rate is around a million dollars), and then building their dream home. Not surprisingly, most of the villas are magnificent. They use West Indian climate to its best advantage; they are light, open to the breeze and they have superb views. About forty-five of them are for hire.
The island is neat and well tended by a posse of gardeners--where Young Island is so profuse, Mustique is sparser and drier. The guests zip around in Jeeps and 'mules' (Japanese farm vehicles). There is plenty of 'space' in Mustique, both geographically and for those who wish to be alone, but for all its exclusiveness, Mustique is also thoroughly West Indian and so it is easy-going and by no means snobbish. People mix with customary Caribbean ease, whether at the weekly cocktail party for house-owners and guests or at Basil's, the only bar on the island, which holds a 'jump-up' (often riotous) each Wednesday.
Mustique has just one hotel, the Cotton House, which is set around an old cotton warehouse. This too has been restored to capture the elegance of the plantation age, with a huge veranda where you can while away dinner for hours. The rooms have been enlarged to accord with nineties demands, but they have retained the inspiration of Oliver Messel, who designed so many of the early villas in Mustique and Barbados.
From an island that is renowned, to an island unknown. Canouan, about twelve miles further south, has just recieved electricity. Here, the arrival of the Snapper is one of the day's major events. There is twenty minutes of commotion and shouting as everyone turns out to get their parcels, greet travellers or just to watch. Ten minutes later the jetty is deserted and the island comatose again.
A short walk down the beach from the mailboat dock, or a simple stroll up a jetty if you arrive by yacht, is the Tamarind Beach Hotel and Yacht Club, a new hotel which stands ranged around a pointed, palm-thatch palapa right on the fantastic, shallow-shelving sand. The Tamarind Beach is untypical for the Grenadines in that the rooms are in blocks, but they are very comfortable, with dark stained wood and a balcony overlooking the sand. It is surprising how loud waves can be, but then equally surprising how the rhythm of the sea becomes soporific and soothing.
Heading south from Canouan you pass Mayreau (population 180, still no mains power) and the uninhabited Tobago Cays, where the yacht masts stand thick in winter. The most southerly of the St Vincent Grenadines is the island-resort of Petit St Vincent, an outcrop which is measured in acres per cottage, and where life is so lazy and luxurious that you communicate by flag and room-service comes to your beach hammock. If the Caribbean promises the finest settings for studied inactivity, the Grenadines are hard to top. You can always watch the plants grow.
Island Hopping from St Vincent
The Grenadines are right there, a magnificent string of islands and cays, some of which barely make it above the surf at high tide. Bequia, Mayreau and Carriacou are some of the loveliest islands in the Caribbean. All the Grenadines can be linked by ferry or by plane journeys, right down to Grenada, another good option. Or you can spend the day sailing to sandbars with just a few palm trees. |
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