The Valley, Anguilla: the capital, the beaches and the boat racing

Evergreen city guide with quick facts, travel, business, and culture.

AnguillaThe Valley

Overview

Anguilla has no cruise berth, no high-rise and no casinos, and it decided on that deliberately — which is why an island this small has some of the emptiest first-rate beaches in the Caribbean.

Reef-Fringed Bays

White powder crescents in clear shallow water right around a flat coral island, ranging from bays with hotels and beach bars to stretches with nothing on them but a track.

Sloop Racing

The national sport — island-built wooden sloops with no engines and enormous sail, raced hard on public holidays from a beach start, with the whole island watching.

The Offshore Cays

Sandy Island's sandbar-and-one-restaurant, Prickly Pear's reef snorkelling, and Scilly Cay, which you reach by waving from a pier until a boat comes to collect you.

Beach Shacks & Crayfish

Open-sided timber shacks grilling split spiny lobster, chicken and johnnycakes on the sand, with rum punch and a live band on the right night — and serious restaurants at the other end.

The Capital & Its History

An honest administrative town with the island's oldest surviving building, a small but genuinely good heritage museum, and the old cotton gin nearby.

Sandy Ground

A village on a spit between the sea and a salt pond holding the small commercial harbour, the boats out to the cays, and most of the island's evening life.

History

Anguilla is a low platform of coral limestone with no volcanic relief, and that geology explains the island: no rivers, little rain, thorn scrub and salt ponds inland, and exceptionally clear water over reef-fringed bays all around the coast. Salt from those ponds was long an export, and the seafaring tradition that supported fishing and inter-island trade produced the island-built wooden sloops that are still raced as the national sport. Development was deliberately kept low-rise and dispersed, and no berth for large cruise ships was ever built.

Culture

Crayfish — the local spiny lobster, split and grilled — is the thing to eat, alongside barbecue chicken, ribs, johnnycakes and pigeon-pea rice. The island runs to two extremes: internationally regarded restaurants at the resorts, and open-sided beach shacks on the sand, with the shacks rotating which nights they cook. Festivals: Anguilla Summer Festival / Carnival (August), with the main boat races, Anguilla Day (May), with racing, Moonsplash music festival (spring). Museums: Heritage Collection Museum, Wallblake House, the island's oldest surviving building.

Practical Info

Safety: A very safe and quiet island. The practical considerations are cost, distance and season: beaches are dispersed and public transport minimal, so budget for a car; many restaurants and some hotels close for several weeks in late summer; and the hurricane season runs June to November. Driving is on the left. Sun exposure is severe on a flat island with little shade. Language: English. No other language is needed, though the proximity of Saint-Martin means French is heard and understood in the ferry and tourism trades. Currency: Eastern Caribbean dollar, held at a fixed rate against the US dollar; US notes are widely accepted with change in local currency. Cards work at hotels and established restaurants, and beach shacks and boat operators generally want cash.
Travel Overview

Anguilla is a long, flat, dry sliver of coral limestone — about twenty-six kilometres end to end and barely five across at its widest — with no hills, no rivers and no rainforest. What it has instead is sand: a fringe of reef-protected bays of genuinely exceptional quality, the kind that appear on lists of the world's best beaches and mostly deserve it. The island made a decision decades ago that shapes everything a visitor encounters. There is no berth for large cruise ships, no casino strip, no high-rise, and development was kept low, dispersed and expensive. The result is an island that feels considerably emptier than its neighbours, where a first-rank beach can be shared with a dozen people on a weekday, and where the price of that is a genuinely high cost of visiting. The Valley, near the centre, is the capital, and it is worth being clear that it is an administrative town rather than a destination: government offices, banks, a couple of small museums and the island's oldest building, all in a few low streets that empty by evening. Visitors sleep at the beaches and come here for the bank or the museum. What binds the island together socially is not the tourism at all but boat racing — locally built wooden sloops, raced hard on public holidays, and taken more seriously here than any other sport anywhere in the region.

Discover The Valley

Geology explains Anguilla quickly. It is a low platform of coral limestone with no volcanic peak, which means no relief to catch rain, so the island is dry, scrubby and low — the highest point is a modest rise, and the interior is thorn scrub, salt ponds and goats rather than forest. That aridity is why there is so little agriculture and why the island historically exported salt from its ponds. It also produces the beaches: with no rivers running off the land, nothing muddies the water, and the reef that fringes most of the coast keeps the bays calm and shallow. The result is a series of white powder crescents with startlingly clear water, spread right around the island rather than concentrated on one sheltered side. The useful distinction here is not which coast you are on but how developed a bay is: Shoal Bay East and Meads Bay have hotels, beach bars and some company; Rendezvous Bay is a very long stretch with a view across to the mountains of Saint-Martin; and a good number of bays in the east and along the north have nothing on them at all beyond a track and a parked car.

Frequently asked questions

Usually via Sint Maarten (SXM), which has long-haul flights, then across the eight-kilometre channel — either the public ferry from Marigot on the French side of Saint-Martin to Blowing Point, or a faster private boat straight from the Dutch-side airport. Both involve immigration on arrival, as Anguilla is a separate territory.

For an hour, honestly. It is an administrative capital rather than a destination — offices, a bank, a supermarket — but Wallblake House is the island's oldest surviving building and the Heritage Collection Museum is much better than its size suggests. Nobody comes to Anguilla for the town, and the town does not pretend otherwise.

By choice. Anguilla never built a berth for large cruise ships and kept development low-rise, dispersed and expensive. The trade-off is real: the island is considerably quieter and emptier than its neighbours, and it is also one of the more costly places to visit in the region.

Diplomatic missions in The Valley

1 embassy based in this city, grouped by region.