Saint Barth: an island on the edge?

Best known today as a secluded retreat for superyacht-owning billionaires and Hollywood A-listers, Saint Barth (French West Indies) enjoys a special reputation amongst the world’s most exclusive destinations. With the island’s star-filled New Years parties and high-end hotels well-documented online, Saint Barth’s unique cache has only grown in recent years, and now more people than ever are finding a way to experience a bit of what this much-talked-about island has to offer.

With a total surface area of just 9.7 square miles (25km2), Saint Barth is too small for large jets. Getting there still involves a second flight or a ferry crossing but there-in-lies one of the keys to Saint Barth’s mystique and its appeal: being an un-straightforward place to get to has made it the perfect hang out for people who do not want to be bothered by photographers or tourists on holiday.

From the very start of its tourism boom, celeb-appeal has sustained the island’s broader appeal and if you are a celebrity who wants to go under the radar Saint Barth is a very good place to visit. There are more photographers than there once were, but the island is not awash with "the paps" and there seems to be a very strong culture of leaving celebrities alone.

But for somewhere that is truly beloved by some and fated by many as the Caribbean’s answer to Saint Tropez, both longstanding visitors and locals seem to love complaining about Saint Barth.

“When I first came here thirty years ago, you could walk miles without seeing a car,” an American visitor told me.

“It never used to be like this,” said another, “it's snobby now, and crowded.”

Traffic, the dominance of the hotels, the extreme cost of living, the difficulty in booking restaurant reservations, noise on beaches, pollution, large building projects and environmental issues - all of this (in the view of some) threatens to undermine the island's core appeal, and the factors that have made it, in the journalistic cliche, "a playground of the rich and famous". The idea of walking anywhere without seeing a car is fantastical. Hotels, villas and restaurants have all proliferated. The island has never been the cheapest holiday destination but both the cost to stay, let alone actually live on the island has risen considerably.

“The people are different now,” a longstanding resident tells me, “they are demanding and rude - I just pretend I can’t speak any English!”

Apart from the attitude of a new wave of visitors, a sad but inevitable result of an island that has gone from a relatively obscure enclave to an on-the-map luxury destination, many people feel that the character of the place is fundamentally under threat.

Jimmy Buffet’s “not too particular, not too precise” Cheeseburger in Paradise is less visible than the “very particular, very precise, Wagyu burger for 40 euros” of more recent times.

Cast ourselves back thirty years and as the Americans quoted above have said, it was both a quieter place and quite a lot less salubrious. The Saint Barth as popularised by the Rockefeller and Rothschild families in the 1950s (not to mention Eden Rock’s Hollywood visitors of the same era) was a haven of quiet beaches and simple but high standard living. It was, we are told, a place where people went for a discrete vacation. It is this version of the island: rustic, peaceful, under-stated, intriguingly French, that many regulars feel is under threat at best, or vanishing entirely at the worst. Visitors from this time speak fondly of empty beaches and a no-frills attitude. A few hotels were there but nowhere near on the same scale.

This version of Saint Barth is now what people refer to as the “old Saint Barth”, both an era and a descriptive term for those parts of the island, or aspects of island life that have retained a sense of its late 20th century chillaxed-ness.

So has this famously chilled-out and away-from-it-all place become a traffic-strewn festival conspicuous consumption? Is it, as many stalwarts are suggesting, a victim of its own success? And does it need to continue on this path in order to attract the well-to-do travellers of the future?

Thankfully, there is a lot more to the island than is reported in fawning magazines - more than sun, sea and Nikki Beach. Saint Barth is blessed with an impressive wildlife scene and a surprising past that stretches back well before the 1950’s aviator Remy de Haenan put the island on the ultra-exclusive travel trail. Saving the island from itself may involve hitting the pause button on the seemingly unstoppable push to luxurify, and build on, every corner of this tiny French territory but a sustainable future is best sought by making the most of what this place already has.

Before the airstrip: an unusual history

Wrongly thought of as having been uninhabited, before the French, St Barth is now understood to have been the home of the Arawaks and the Caribs, though little physical evidence of their heritage remains on the island. The Caribs knew the island as Ouanalao, a name that is given recognition on the island's distinctive pelican-adorned coat of arms, and are believed to have lived on Barts as far back as 1100.

European interaction with Saint Barth happened much later. Christopher Columbus sailed past the island during his second voyage to discover the Americas in 1493 and named it after his brother Bartholmeo, himself a cartographer and explorer from Genoa. The first French settlers struggled to make a living and St Barth was eventually sold to the Knights of Malta in 1651, starting a period of two-ing and fro-ing between European colonists that would continue for another 200 years.

Too arid for the cultivation of sugar plantations, Barts instead grew as a trading centre. Pirates and other merchants of ill-repute made use of the harbour where much of the cargo was plundered goods from Spanish vessels. It was around this time that the notoriously violent French pirate, Montbars the Exterminator, is thought to have made his base on the island, allegedly (but probably not) leaving his treasure there before his death in 1707.

Not to be left out, the British attacked the island several times in the 1700s during the course of global conflicts with France. A naval force burnt down much of the “capital” Gustavia in 1744 and the British later held a brief occupation in 1758 during the Seven Years War.

The sudden transition of Barts to Swedish ownership is one of the more peculiar moments in Caribbean colonial history but a formative one for the island. In 1784, the island officially became the only Swedish colony in the Caribbean when Louis XVI sold it to the Swedes in exchange for trading rights at Gothenburg. The most historically significant decision taken by the colonists in this time was to begin St Barth’s status as a duty-free port. It is this innovation that, 200 years on, has allowed Gustavia to become an outlet of high-end fashion with Hermes, LV, Bulgari, Cartier and a plethora of watch shops lining the main thoroughfare.

Barts, and particularly Gustavia, thrived under Swedish rule and a not-inconsiderable amount of the area’s historic built environment dates from this period. Gustavia is named after the Swedish King Gustaf III whilst the Brigantin Building, itself a survivor from the Swedish period, is still home to an Honorary Swedish Consul.

Slavery was practiced on St Barth under both French and Swedish rule. It was outlawed in 1847, at which time there were around 530 enslaved people, but don’t expect to see or hear much about this when you are visiting the island. Instead, with the island having been barely in the focus of European attention, there is a persistent idea that slavery did not take place on the island at all, a notion that today’s tourism bodies could try to correct. Helpfully, there is now a plaque commemorating the abolition of slavery on the island, at a beautiful location within the historic garden at Fort Gustaf.

By the mid-19th century, the Swedish government no longer saw a use for Barts and a popular referendum was held which led to the return of French rule in 1878. A period of relative calm ensued, and it would be another 70 years before the island’s modern, and best known, incarnation as a travel destination would begin.

The holiday-makers arrive

In 1946, a light aircraft, piloted by a future Mayor of Saint Barth, made history when it touched down on a patch of grass at Saint-Jean, marking the first successful landing of an aircraft on the island.

Landing between a herd of sheep and a pond, Rémy de Haenen‘s flight transformed the fortunes of the island and started a period of expansion that has continued to this day. A hugely celebrated figure on St Barth, in 1953 Haenen built a guesthouse on a small outcrop of rock in Saint-Jean. Many locals thought the venture was madness at the time but Haenen was soon entertaining the great and the good in what would become the world-famous Eden Rock Hotel.

Though it would take until the 1970s for the runway to be concreted and the 80s for full electricity to be installed, by this time, the island had already become the ultra-exclusive destination of the two families that first gave St Barth the glamour and intrigue that has grown year on year: the Rockefellers and Rothschilds.

David Rockefeller drew international attention with the building of his “dream house” overlooking Colombier Beach, completed in 1957. The Rockefeller residence is now derelict while Benjamin de Rothschild’s villa in Marigot was sold in 2017 for [roughly, the final figure was not disclosed] $67 million. Last year, the Rockefeller property sold for $136 million, a record figure for a private property in the Central and South American region.

Today Eden Rock is regularly recognised as one of the best hotels not just in the Caribbean but in the world. A succession of private charter aircraft roar past the hotel every day, oddly not detracting from the island’s appeal, but very much part of it.

Nobody could have imagined, when De Haenan’s Cucuracha was burbling around Saint Jean that this would mark the beginning of the island’s incredible rise, in just a few decades, from a relatively poor French territory to one of the world’s most exclusive travel destinations. De Haenen went on to be Saint Barth’s mayor and, whatever his shortcomings may have been, he must surely stand out as one of the great travel visionaries of the region.

De Haenen’s exploits marked the beginning of Saint Barth as a serious destination for tourists and it is this era, roughly 1953 to the early 2000s, that is wistfully looked back on by visitors as the peak of the island’s “before the crowds” appeal. In the years since then, Barts has seen a construction and tourism boom that has impacted both its natural environment and its character.

Saturation point

The American singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffet has long been lauded as the unofficial lyricist of the island. Many of his songs were inspired by the Caribbean, indeed he wrote some of them at Eden Rock, but it is one of his lesser-known tunes that encapsulates his experience of the island. In Autour de Rocher, Buffet tell us about a now long-lost hotel in Lorient, a wreck since 1991. The lyrics perfectly encapsulate what he describes as his “early years” on the “old Saint Barth” and concludes with the following verse:

Then the glitz and all the glamour

Hit like a hurricane

Or maybe we just all grew up

But it never was the same

“The Rock” is fondly remembered by Bart-goers of a certain vintage. An eclectic outfit with a diverse clientele, it was known for being a loose establishment that was ultimately closed by the police and then destroyed in a fire. Oddly, it may well be that its demise saved Lorient from the same fate as Saint Jean. For a while, the remains of the hotel stood eerily above Lorient Bay and at one point fell into the ownership of American chat show host, David Letterman. To nobody’s surprise it is, at the time of writing, being developed into a very substantial villa.

The place where it all started, the Baie de St Jean, is perhaps emblematic of Saint Barth’s transition from old to new Saint Barths. East of Eden Rock, two small bungalows in the old-style white walls and red roofs stand derelict in an overgrown garden. Before Hurricane Irma, a devastating Category 5 hurricane that hit the Leeward Islands in 2017, these were humble rentals. Today the land they sit on is being held as an investment. It is now wedged between three loud beach clubs.

At least one of these clubs has annoyed residents so much that it has had the police called to it to stop the noise and now might incur legal action from locals fed up with having music blasted into their garden. The next property is Camp David, named after a former British owner, the 2.4 acre site passed into the hands of Whatsapp founder Jan Koum last year for (reportedly) just over $70m. The other side of Eden Rock nearly saw the construction of another $170m hotel, thankfully rejected following a petition of more than 2,000 people who felt this was one step too far.

Eden Rock itself is a vast version of its former self. Purchased by David and Jane Matthews in 1997, like most of the hotels it was heavily impacted by Hurricane Irma in 2017 and has undergone a period of closure, the selling off of part of the ownership to the Oetker Collection and re-building a more expansive and hurricane-proof version of itself. You could almost fit the original ground floor bar into the hotel’s modern gift shop. In 2024, it opened its (up-to £2.8k per night) Pippa Suite, a nod to the owner’s son’s wife, Pippa Middleton.

St Jean, with its shops and proximity to the airport, was arguably always going to become the loud beach. But it is not the only beach that has gotten busier in recent years.

Grand Cul-de-Sac once had a truly away-from-it-all vibe. The bay is a protected nature reserve, a place where you can reasonably expect to encounter the endangered green turtle on every visit, feeding on the bay’s seagrasses. Also bordering the waterfront are two salt lakes, home to yellow-crowned night heron, belted kingfisher and semipalmated plover.

Today the beach area is entirely ringed by hotels and apartments, including Le Barthelemy. The latter promises “a low impact hotel with sustainable architecture” but has also been subject to two government notices for dumping toxic waste, one in 2019 and a second in 2021.

Even before the construction of this hotel, back in 2015, an American visitor said to be keen to preserve “the old Saint Barth” bought one of the lakes and is now working with the Collectivity to restore it. It is a thoughtful private-public partnership and potentially a model for future reserves here.

The wonderful Turk’s cap cacti was once dotted all over the headlands at both Toiny and Grand Cul De Sac but three years ago an invasive caterpillar arrived and has appeared to wipe out most of them. Elsewhere, vast new villas loom over the more traditional housing at Flamand and even in Corossol, long an untouched “locals” area, has seen the appearance of the mega-villas on its hillside.

With mega-villas has come mega prices. Or, as Michael Gross has put it in his excellent long read on the state of Saint Barth: “The paradise island is lost at sea due to overdevelopment, flashy investors, and $70 shrimp pastas”. If you are after the sort of places where wines by the bottle start at 100 euros and the local wine store has bottles of Cheval Blanc and Petrus left out like they were your everyday go-to vintages, then the luxurified end of Saint Barth is just for you. Renting a sun lounger for 200 euros or buying a “huge cookie” for 150 euros plainly impresses some people but for others it can leave a sense in which you are now just being ripped off.

A hot chocolate and decaf coffee from a Nespresso machine? That will be 17.60 euros please, tip not included. And the valet needs 20 euros too.

To an extent, getting cross with Saint Barth for being expensive does not make a huge amount of sense. Importing everything makes it expensive by default and it charges what other ultra high-end destinations charge for similar experiences. Today there are those that feel some of these prices are taking the piss, but there are others for whom the prices are self-referential. To quote someone slightly closer to home: “For those who like that sort of thing. That is the sort of thing they like.”

Room for nature

The island itself is not uniquely famous for its nature but when the people who know it best are asked to list what they find “most special” about the place, the island’s nature often comes top. You don’t have to go too far out of your way to watch the hunting behaviour of ospreys, American kestrel, brown boobies, brown pelicans and great egrets, all at close quarters. Without donning your scuba gear, it is possible to come face-to-face with barracuda, and the juvenile moray eels that have made themselves home in the Baie de Saint Jean (metres from Nikki Beach, Eden Rock and Gypsea). Green turtles, thankfully growing in number on the island, is a wildlife experience that visitors cherish.

The wildlife scene on and around Saint Barth is fascinating, complicated and (some would argue) tragic in equal measure. Like any small island that has been settled by humans, it faces challenges from invasive species and like anywhere with corals, climate change is a constant problem.

It has an endemic and unique species of frog, the Saint Barthelemy frog but no one has seen this in decades, no photographs exist and it is assumed extinct. The species that are there have come from other islands: the Lesser Antilles Frog being of limited concern as it comes from the locality but also three other species which are thought to have arrived via imported garden plants. These plants are themselves now invasive species.

Saint Barth boasts an impressive coverage of cacti but this is nibbled on by wild goats, descendants of those brought by early settlers. The goats also go for the nests of the island’s important nesting seabird population and have a huge influence over the way that land is maintained through both grazing and trampling. The much loved red-footed tortoise, which has proliferated in recent years, is an introduced species, and is thought to be endangering already endangered plant species. The population of endangered Lesser Antilles Iguana is at risk of hybridisation with the common iguana.

A surprisingly big menace to endemic wildlife are the hens that escaped when Hurricane Irma destroyed several chicken coups as well as the presence of feral cats. Last year, the island’s L’Agence Territoriale de l’Environnement (ATE), neutered around 1,000 cats in an effort to control the population.

In 2017, the Wildlife Conservation Society produced a 124-page report: Environmental Conservation in Saint Barthélemy – Current knowledge and research recommendations. Reefs were in a critical condition, fish were being overfished to populations “below the benchmark for regional recovery” within the Marine Protected Areas, fish were being caught illegally, and the condition of the seagrass was considered “mediocre”. Environmental protection was found to be lacking both in legislation and in enforcement.

A large salt lake at St-Jean, directly behind Eden Rock, was described as “a dysfunctional anoxic ecosystem with hazardous levels of several nutrients, bacteria, and metals”. Its deterioration was attributed to the lack of any enforcement of pollution control, and the disruption of the pond’s connection with the sea (the primary connection runs between what is now Eden Rock’s Remy’s Bar and Sand Bar). Dead pelicans and other seabirds (botulism from poor water quality), a collapse in the number of nesting birds, large fish die-offs during the dry season, as well as a fall in the number of endangered iguanas, all resulted.

This is hardly a surprise when, as the WCS report tells us: “there is no “Water Law” to regulate the discharge of pollutants into the waters of St-Barthélemy or control surface runoffs from construction sites and urban environments. Therefore, anything can be legally released into the salt ponds or sea.” Two years before the WCS report, French environmental lawyers Chantal Cans and Thierry Touret had concluded that the island’s legal framework for the environment had some alarming shortcomings.

This pond, though, had an unlikely well-wisher in the form of Roman Abromovich, the Russian businessman who famously hosted celeb-filled New Year’s parties at his $90m (2009 values) property near Colombier Beach. As well as paying for the island’s football stadium, he found the funds for a feasibility study into restoring the salt lake back in 2012. Today this pond has had its access to the sea restored, its mangrove re-planted and you can now expect to see green heron, osprey and black-necked stilt from a well-maintained wooden walk-way. According to The New York Times, he also funded the pond’s restoration, which Saint Barth Weekly had quoted as costing more than 3 million euros. My understanding is this was a public-private partnership, which included the Eden Rock Hotel itself.

The L’Agence Territoriale de l’Environnement (ATE), is a well resourced agency that occupies the site of an old fort, Fort Gustaf, named after the Swedish King Gustaf III who ruled over the island in the mid 19th century. It is a wonderfully symbolic location, overlooking both the capital of Gustavia and the still active fort of Fort Oscar, today occupied by the local police force. The ATE was formed in 2013, a year after Saint Barthxit, when it left the European Union as part of the break from Guadeloupe.

Today it is righting the wrongs of the past, with innovative programmes across habitat restoration, invasive species control, education and outreach, research and much more. But the wider question is, perhaps: how does Saint Barth adapt to, and continue to be a tourist destination, in the middle of a climate catastrophe?

There is now, finally, a household recycling service - but this is glass and metals only, though you can now take your plastic waste to a large supermarket. Many Americans, it turns out, like outdoor pools to be heated even when the ambient temperature is already in the high 20Cs, early 30Cs. The sea temperature is a very pleasant 26C to 29C all year round, and yet the outdoor pools still need to be warmed.

One of the island’s hotels now has a car park restricted to electric cars only, with a sign announcing that this is for the benefit of the environment and comfort of their guests. A move to electric vehicles is critical on St Barth, particularly with the volume of traffic that now idles in Gustavia, but it might well be argued that if you are taking two separate flights to an island that is powered by an diesel power station, renting a BMW i3 is hardly going to undo the carbon output of your holiday.

Then there’s the plants. St Barth is an arid place which has to desalinate water to get its own supply. Many of the imported plants need irrigation to survive. There is a concern that solar panels, despite their obvious advantages on an island with almost continuous sunshine, would ruin the aesthetic of the island’s distinctive red rooftops - now apparently coming back into fashion as owners turn against the sleek mega-villas.

Much of the commentary of those visiting the island in recent years is that a longer-term approach is needed and that won’t always benefit the few people for whom, according to some, politics and profiteering have historically been linked on this small and easily over-exploited island. It is rarely put down on paper, but Nina Burleigh’s 2022 article in the New York Times is a useful overview of some of the difficulties islanders now face to clear up the island’s approach to land management. Her work details a legal regime around construction that is entirely malleable if you have the money and connections, from mere “influencing” to outright bribery.

Burleigh rightly credits the emergence of the pro-green Ouanolo Guardians and Essential Saint Barth (ESB) organisations, which have done much to highlight the island’s problems in recent years. ESB was led by Hélène Bernier, a taxi driver who was successfully elected as Saint Barth’s Vice President in 2022. Hélène has seen the extent of the island’s corruption first hand, having been offered a one million euro bribe to approve a green zone exemption by a property developer. You can still order a taxi with Hélène, even as she serves her time as VP.

A sustainable future?

Hurricane Irma, which hit the Lesser Antilles on 12th September 2017, is seen as one of the recent “turning points” for the island. It happened just as Barts was starting to make a concerted effort to slow down construction and pro-green voices were starting to be heard more loudly. The other “turning points” are generally thought to be the end of the Magras administration and the court ruling that ended the L’Etoile project, the would-be Saint Jean beach-side hotel that triggered the 2,700 signature petition in opposition to it.

Attitudes did not change overnight but in the years since, there has been a greater focus on protecting Saint Barth’s ecosystem and an acknowledgement that the island may be reaching a critical moment to save the very things that visitors like about the place. There is actually a lot “going on” to reverse the trend of recent years. Tree planting, mangrove restoration, dune restoration, upgrades to the water system, pioneering coral reef restoration, changes in fishing practices, composting organic waste at restaurants, reintroducing indigenous plant species, education programmes, all of this is helping, bit by bit, to get the island onto a more sustainable footing.

There is now a considerable effort around solar power on the island, in addition to a waste-to-energy power plant operated by Cyclergie. Hotels are turning to both solar and rainwater harvesting - an important step as desalination plants can be very energy intensive.

Elsewhere, Saline’s sand dunes are finally getting restored. Like the island’s ponds, it was only when things got to such a poor state that something was finally done here. In 2017, the storm surge that came with Irma threatened to over-top the dunes, prompting a more concerted effort to fill in an old sand quarry which had removed large tracts, and hugely eroded the effectiveness of this important habitat. There is hope that the public-private partnerships pioneered at both the St Jean salt lake and more recently at Grand-Cul-De-Sac will be a model for further habitat restoration on the island. Today the St Jean lake regularly sees ospreys, herons, egret and the world’s smallest tern - the “least” tern.

Moreover, visitors are getting a sense in which looking after the island, and the planet, is no longer an after-thought but very much part of the island’s public and private efforts and - perhaps - a big part of the next chapter in its history.

A ban on building new villas on untouched land was already in place before Irma. Since then, there has been a change in the size of the villa you can build and the style. Everything now needs to be single storey. 60 per cent of the island is a “green zone” where no development of any kind is allowed - although some would say that needs to be less…adaptable.

On the local protection side, information is key. The ATE now produces a range of very engaging literature on the island’s wildlife and how to look after it. But there is a perception that this needs to get right into the hands of the people visiting the island. Options range from mandating the hotels and villa management to ensure these guides are in the rooms of visitors, or a “Saint Barth Code”, clearly setting codes of behaviour at the beaches. Other developments might include informing visitors that certain kinds of sun blocker kills corals, or even providing subsidised coral-friendly sun blocker on site and in hotel rooms. Paying into projects, or a dedicated fund, on both the island itself but perhaps neighbouring islands also, could be a way forward.

Nina Burleigh was very direct when she summed up her views in The New York Times: “If arguably some of the world’s wealthiest and most sophisticated people can’t or won’t protect the air, water, coral reefs and sea turtles around their own playground, how can anyone reasonably expect humanity to protect the planet?”

As for the ethos of this storied island; nostalgiarists need to remember that the island cannot stay still and nor can it turn the clock back to (whichever decade) is the presumed golden age in the eyes of some. The showy duty free shops of Gustavia are as much a part of its history and present day identity as the Autour de Rocher, the Rockefeller House or indeed the many varied years of pre-tourism St Barth.

Recent restrictions on new building suggest at least an acknowledgment that the island may be reaching saturation point in terms of the numbers of visitors and the number of villas. Saint Barth is, in a sense, in a bit of a trap. It has positioned itself amongst the world’s most exclusive getaways and its financial future depends on remaining somewhere in that space. It cannot stand still and it cannot go backwards.

The island has been on a journey not too dissimilar to that of Monaco. A sprinkle of star power in the middle of the last century brought in a surge of much needed money and the start of a tourism boom but the resulting busy-ness threatens to undermine the original appeal of the place. Incidentally, both places have been able to continue offering income tax free status to residents throughout recent history.

In Piers Morgan’s 2008 ITV programme on Monaco, the journalist stood at the American Bar at the Hotel-de-Paris, pointing at pictures of Peter Sellers, Orson Welles and Errol Flynn, and told viewers “it has still got it, but it hasn’t got that”. He could easily have been talking about Eden Rock, although as the original and hugely pioneering hotel on the island, it is hard to begrudge the place its incredible success. After all, a Saint Barth with only Eden Rock on it would be perfectly sustainable.

Monaco today has felt the need to reposition itself for a generation that isn’t hugely interested or even aware of the Golden Age of Hollywood and for whom discretion and under-statement aren’t huge priorities - that would be my generation, the affirmation-hungry millennials. The atmosphere on Saint Barth has changed not just because it is busier but because both the nature of celebrity and travel culture has changed. Discretion is less important and showing off is the norm.

And for those still seeking the much-vaunted old Saint Barth? At Le Select, the famous burger joint established in 1949 by Marius Stakelborough, a mural on the wall depicts the restaurant at its past location with a few words opining people to “remember what was”. Marius, and plenty of the mural’s sponsors, are of course both instigators and beneficiaries of the island’s modern-day success but it is this “old Saint Barth” that is harked back to by the people who remember it.

It is possible to still experience this more chilled version of Saint Barth. The really busy section occurs, in effect, along a continuous stretch of road that goes from Lorient, through Saint-Jean and into Gustavia. Those parts of the island that are further away from the main drag (Saline, Gouverner, Flamands, Petit Cul De Sac) still retain a sense of the famously disconnected chilled-out vibe that brought holiday-makers here in the first place.

You do have to go a bit more out of your way for some peace and quiet and the kind of experience eulogised by Jimmy Buffet but the essence of the place is still very much there. You can still drive up to Marigot Beach (and leave your car unlocked, if you so wish), find the beach (almost) to yourself and snorkel amongst nurse sharks and turtles.

At Eddy’s, one of the stalwart restaurants on the island, you can help the island with its invasive species problem by enjoying their excellent goat curry. If that is not your thing, over the road, Black Ginger offers the world’s best Thai green curries. Again on the same road, surrounded by the excesses of modern day Gustavia, a 19th century Anglican church founded by a naturalised Briton, Sir Richard Dinzey, offers soulful respite from the conspicuous consumption taking place outside its doors. If your holiday interests are more National Trust than trust fund, then Gustavia’s evocative history trail and views out into the ocean are just for you.

Back at Saint-Jean, Eden Rock still conveys the pioneering essence of its famous founder and the green turtles are doing well.

“It was a 10 when I first visited 34 years ago and it is still a 10”, one regular offered me.

“Most Caribbean islands are a 9.9”, said another, “this one is a 10”.