welcome to pARADISE

On my first morning in Antigua, I wake early for a swim, a sure-fire way to rinse off the mental grime of the nine-hour flight. I bob on my back in the warm water of the Caribbean and watch the clouds from the night’s showers turn pink then gold as the sun rises over the hills. A lone dog trots about the coconut palms some way down the beach and a couple of turtle doves warble to one another, a gentle accompaniment to the clamorous chirps of local tree frogs. (The brown amphibians, barely an inch long, must be 95% voice-box.) Mine are the only human footprints in the sand.

There are certainly more challenging places in which to obey the two-metre rule. And, thankfully, Antigua is one of the easier places for a British traveller to visit in a world closed off by COVID restrictions. If you show no symptoms, you won’t have to quarantine once you step off the plane at V.C. Bird International Airport, though you must show evidence of a negative COVID test, taken within seven days of arrival. Face masks should be worn in public spaces.  

Beyond that, the island is open and attempting as normal a tourist season as possible. Once you’ve landed, the greatest peril you’re likely to face is the risk of an unusual tan line if you forget to remove your face mask whilst napping in a hotel hammock. The 11pm curfew might mean you finish off your rum punch at a beach bar rather more swiftly than is advisable.

I’m staying in southern Antigua at the Inn at English Harbour, a hotel designed to fully cocoon its guests from the outside world. There are a few ‘cabana’ rooms right on the beach, for anyone reluctant to walk more than 10 paces from their bed to the Caribbean, but I’m in one of the suites that sit back from the pool: enormous rooms in clapboard villas, with canopied four-posters, mahogany floors and verandas big enough to host a decent game of tennis.

Like most on the island, the hotel is quiet, operating at 50% capacity when I visit in December. Every member of staff I bump into as I roam the grounds stops to chat and welcome me to the island, most expressing relief that a few visitors have now started to return. The pervading atmosphere of easygoing hospitality is, I suspect, a feature of the Inn at English Harbour even at its busiest. “We’re usually full now,” says manager Fabio Giorgi when I meet him in the foyer. “But it’s getting better. From the end of the month, 20 out of our 28 rooms are booked.” An Italian who, in an unlikely turn of events, came to Antigua by way of Birmingham 18 years ago, Fabio seems naturally predisposed to optimism. “The island managed COVID very well,” he says with a smile. “Perhaps the virus doesn’t like the sun and clear air here.”

The guests who have already turned up seem barely able to believe their luck. British families with young children splash about in the shallows of the Caribbean, the expression on the parents’ faces one of perpetually surprised joy, perhaps incredulous that they are there at all. Thirty-something couples in immaculate beachwear, their cheeks red from the unaccustomed sun, sit at the shore-side Reef restaurant, ordering rum Old-Fashioneds and shrimp salad. Yellow-breasted Bananaquit birds watch from nearby tables, sharp-eyed for stray crumbs.

In the evening, diners gather at the more formal hilltop Terrace restaurant. Their attention ping-pongs from plates of red tuna tartare or grilled mahi-mahi fish to the view: one of tamarind trees, Cassie bush and bougainvillea tumbling down to a horse-shoe bay dotted with boats. At night, the contented chatter breaks only as guests lean back in their chairs and look upwards, distracted by a sky studded with stars and the faint sliver of the moon.Visible, too, from the Reef restaurant is Nelson’s Dockyard, an eighteenth-century harbour that’s undergone careful restoration since the 1950s and is now a UNESCO site. Still in operation today, as the moored superyachts attest, the dock’s first function was to clean British warships sent to protect the Leeward Islands, and the sugar they produced, from attack by European rivals. It was the labour of enslaved Africans that kept the sugar mills running and that built the dockyard; many of their descendants remain on the island, some working as boat builders in that same dockyard today. 

Heritage resources officer Desley Gardner, wearing a cheerful Christmas tree badge on her white polo shirt, shows me around, taking me to the thick-stoned sail loft, lumber store and clerk’s house. The buildings are now converted for the use of 21st-century voyagers, containing a boutique hotel, restaurant, supermarket and a souvenir shop selling flip-flops and hot sauce. A few sailors have come ashore to drink cups of coffee and mango smoothies on the restaurant terrace, but otherwise I have the site entirely to myself.

We potter around the museum in the old admiral’s house, a two-storey mansion filled with glass cabinets containing the domestic paraphernalia of nautical life. In one room lies the death mask of Admiral Nelson, tiny as a child’s. He came to Antigua from 1784 to 1787, and promptly declared the island ‘an infernal hole’. “He stayed on his ship most of the time, and he threw a threw a lot of parties for his men,’ says Desley. “We have orders for huge barrels of butter and pounds of pork and barrels of wine – all for one night!”

The hurricanes that periodically crash through the Caribbean mean that relics from the dockyard’s heyday are still being revealed, Antigua’s rain-churned beaches releasing their buried treasure. One storm raised the bodies of 16 sailors at Freeman’s Bay, the palm-lined crescent overlooked by the Inn at English Harbour. “We believe they’re British,” says Desley. “Something happened on their ship, and they had to bury them fast and move on.” We pause at the dockyard’s simple stone kitchen, now a bakery selling meat patties and pineapple turnovers. “Sometimes we dread a heavy rain because we think, what is it going to reveal next?” she says with a laugh. “You don’t want to come across bones when you’re building a sandcastle on the beach.”

I come across no skeletons on the beaches I visit, making a tiny dent in the 365 on Antigua (“one for every day of the year,” as you will be told, frequently). A patch of sand exists for every type of beach experience you might possibly hanker after: whether that’s cocktails and burgers delivered to your day bed to an ambient soundtrack, or to quietly sit on the sand and watch fishermen clean red snappers in the shade of a seagrape tree. On an afternoon meander around the island, with the sea never far from view, I ask my taxi driver, Paul ‘Stumpy’ Christian, which is his favourite. “Maybe Long Bay. No, Darkwood. Or Turners. Or Half Moon Bay.” He frowns and gives up. “Oh, you cannot have a favourite beach here. There are too many.”

We trundle along roads lined with banana palms and yellow Allamanda bushes, passing stalls selling pineapples, mangos and roast peanuts, and restaurants advertising goat curry, king crab and Jerk chicken. Dipping into the interior, I find an Antigua that seems to belong to an entirely different island: cool and dark, where creepers dangle from mahogany and fig trees, and lone herons stand motionless over waterlily-filled ponds.

To experience another side to Antigua again, the following day I join Captain Shamel and his son Reef on a catamaran trip from Jolly Harbour. With a few raindrops spattering on deck, we putter through a marina busy with sailors, assiduously obeying the internationally recognised law of the sea that one must wave at all other people also on boats. Our sights are set on a chain of 22 islands that lace out from the mainland, some home to luxury hotels with private villas going for £35,000-plus a night, others barely big enough to support a couple of deckchairs.

A squadron of brown pelicans joins us as we round the headland and pass a shoreline woven with the twisted trunks of mangrove. We stop to snorkel, floating above shoals of yellow-tailed tuna, and single parrot and puffer fish. Shamel dives down through water streaked with shafts of sunlight to scoop up prickly sea urchins, before delicately replacing them amongst the coral. At Hell’s Gate island, we swim ashore, clambering around pitted limestone rocks and through a small cave, its sandy bottom traced with the tracks of hermit crabs. “The Europeans who first came to Antigua really didn’t like it, and they gave places names like hell and devil,” says Reef, when I ask him about the origin of ‘Hell’s Gate’. He smiles. “It’s come a long way since.”

Certainly, Antigua’s wildlife knows how to put on a show to disarm the most hostile of visitors. At Great Bird Island, we get a rare sighting of the endemic racer snake weaving through low bushes, likely hunting for bird’s eggs. High above us there is indeed a great bird – a red-throated magnificent frigatebird, soaring on 7ft wings. As we motor back to the mainland, sleepy from the sea air and scorched from the sun, we are treated to a final local performance. A shadowy mass glides just beneath the surface of the water and briefly breaks through: a Hawksbill sea turtle. It gives us the side-eye, splashes a flipper, and is gone.

Long shadows stretch out from Antigua’s crinkled hills by the time we return to Jolly Harbour. Like most of the islands’ population, I drift back towards the shore, to watch in slight stupefaction as the last rays of the setting sun turn the clouds electric and the night sky fills with a billion stars.

The morning’s brief showers seem an aeon ago, and I think about Darron, an employee at The Inn at English Harbour who I met post-swim that first day. We’d chatted about our respective lockdowns and how happy we were that life on the island was returning to normal. “That’s how it is in paradise,” he said with a shrug. “It might rain in the morning but the sun always comes out eventually.”