Saint Kitts and Nevis

Basseterre — the capital of Saint Kitts and Nevis (a twin-island federation, the smallest sovereign nation in the Americas by both area and population — 261km², 55,000 people) with the Independence Square (the octagonal town square where enslaved Africans were once sold — the island’s most historically layered site, now peaceful with a fountain and Georgian buildings) and the St George’s Anglican Church (built 1869, the fourth church on the site).

💡 Saint Kitts was the first English settlement in the Caribbean — Sir Thomas Warner landed on 28 January 1623 and established a settlement at Old Road on the southwestern coast, making it the “Mother Colony of the West Indies” from which England colonised much of the rest of the Caribbean. The first successful sugarcane cultivation in the English Caribbean began on Saint Kitts; by 1700 the island was one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the British Empire.

Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park (UNESCO World Heritage — a British fortress built on a 240m volcanic plug between 1690 and 1790, the most complete and best-preserved British fortress in the Caribbean — the “Gibraltar of the West Indies” — with the citadel, barracks, magazines and fortifications visible in their entirety, with views of Nevis, Sint Eustatius, Saba and St Barts from the battlements).

💡 Brimstone Hill Fortress was built almost entirely using enslaved African labour between 1690 and 1790 — a century of construction using 800,000+ tons of volcanic basalt quarried on-site. The fortress was designed by British engineers on the principles of the Vauban fortification system; its construction represents the most intensive military engineering project undertaken in the Caribbean. It was captured by the French in 1782 after a month-long siege but returned to Britain by treaty the following year.

The Saint Kitts Scenic Railway (a narrow-gauge railway originally built in 1912 to transport sugarcane from the island’s fields to the central mill in Basseterre, now the last remaining passenger railway in the Caribbean, running a 30km circuit around the entire island with double-decker carriages, commentary and rum punch — the most panoramic journey in the Leeward Islands).

💡 The Saint Kitts sugar industry (introduced 1640, the single crop that defined the island’s economy for 360 years) ended in July 2005 when the government closed the last operating sugar mill, ending what was at that point the longest continuously operating sugar industry in the western hemisphere. The closure was economically necessary (EU sugar subsidies were ending) but socially devastating; the Scenic Railway and tourism are the primary replacements.

35 min ferry. Nevis (a nearly circular volcanic island dominated by the cloud-wreathed Nevis Peak at 985m — the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, the first US Secretary of the Treasury, born 11 January 1755 or 1757 at Charlestown) with the Museum of Nevis History (in the reconstructed house where Hamilton was born, the finest Hamilton museum outside the US) and the Bath Hotel (a Georgian thermal spa hotel of 1778 — the oldest hotel in the Caribbean).

💡 Alexander Hamilton was born on Nevis in 1755 or 1757 (the date is disputed — Hamilton himself gave both years at different times, possibly to conceal his illegitimate birth) and left the island at age 17 to study in New York. He became George Washington’s aide-de-camp, co-authored the Federalist Papers, founded the US financial system as the first Secretary of the Treasury and was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804. The 2015 Broadway musical Hamilton (by Lin-Manuel Miranda) brought his Nevis origins to global attention.

Nevis Peak (985m — the summit of the near-perfect volcanic cone that forms most of Nevis island, requiring 4–5 hours return and a certified guide, through the four ecological zones of the island: dry scrub, fruit tree forest, montane rainforest and cloud forest at the summit — the finest mountain hike in the Leeward Islands, with views from the top extending to Saint Kitts, Montserrat, Antigua and Sint Eustatius on clear days).

💡 Nevis Peak is almost always shrouded in cloud — the summit is so frequently hidden that Columbus named the island “Nuestra Señora de las Nieves” (Our Lady of the Snows) in 1493, thinking the cloud-covered summit resembled a snow-capped mountain. The name was shortened to Nevis by English settlers. The cloud that gives the island its name is a permanent orographic cloud formed by the Trade Wind hitting the volcanic cone.

Pinney’s Beach (the finest beach on Nevis — a 5km strip of golden sand on the northwestern coast, calm Caribbean water, the Four Seasons Nevis and the beach bars of the Sunshine’s Beach Bar & Grill — home of the Killer Bee cocktail, the most popular beach drink in Nevis) and the Nevis Heritage Trail (the ruins of the plantation houses and sugar mills dotted across the island’s hillsides).

💡 Sunshine’s Beach Bar (Pinney’s Beach, Nevis) and its Killer Bee cocktail (rum, guava, passion fruit, grenadine and a “secret ingredient” — the proportions are Sunshine’s trade secret, served in a plastic cup at US$7–12) have been written about in virtually every major travel publication since the 1990s. Sunshine Caines has run the bar since the 1980s; it was one of the first Caribbean beach bars to attract international celebrity visitors.

A return to Saint Kitts for Frigate Bay Beach (the most popular beach on the island, with the lively beach bar strip of the South Frigate Bay and the calmer North Frigate Bay Atlantic side) and a final plantation dinner at one of the island’s converted sugar mill hotels before flying from Saint Kitts (SKB).

💡 Saint Kitts’s plantation hotels (former sugar plantation great houses converted into boutique hotels — Ottley’s Plantation Inn, Rawlins Plantation, The Belle Mont Farm on Mount Liamuiga) represent the finest examples of Caribbean plantation hotel conversion, presenting the beauty of the colonial architecture with (increasingly) honest interpretation of the enslaved labour that built it.