St John's, Antigua: the harbour, the beaches and English Harbour

St John's is compact and best walked in the morning before the heat. Its landmark is the cathedral of St John the Divine, set on high ground above the centre with two pale towers that are visible from the harbour and from half the streets in town; the interior is unusual — the whole thing is lined in pitch pine, a construction decision taken so the building could ride out earthquakes, and the effect is of a great wooden ship turned upside down. Down at the water, Heritage Quay and Redcliffe Quay are two restored runs of nineteenth-century warehouse buildings, now duty-free shops, bars and galleries; Redcliffe is much the more attractive of the two, with brick and timber and shaded courtyards. Inland a few blocks is the public market, which is where the town does its own business — produce, fish, spices, and the black pineapple that Antigua grows on the southwest coast and which is genuinely one of the sweetest in the world. Friday and Saturday mornings are the busy ones. The museum, in the old courthouse on Long Street, is small and gives a useful hour on the island's geology and archaeology.

The number is a marketing line that happens to be roughly accurate, because Antigua is low and its coastline is crumpled into an extraordinary number of small bays. What matters is not the count but the coasts. The west and southwest face the Caribbean: calm, clear, shallow water, powder sand, and most of the island's hotels — Dickenson Bay in the north is the busy one with watersports and beach bars, Darkwood and Ffryes on the southwest coast are quieter and take the sunset, and Jolly Beach is long and gentle. The south around Falmouth and English Harbour has small coves, the best of them a short walk or boat ride from the yachts. The east and northeast face the Atlantic: Half Moon Bay is a long curve of pale sand with real surf at one end and calm water at the other, and Long Bay has reef close enough to snorkel from the sand. Every beach in Antigua is public to the high-water mark, so a resort frontage is walkable — access paths exist and are used. If you want one rule: west for swimming and sunsets, east for space and drama.

In the south of the island, a set of deep, almost enclosed inlets makes one of the best natural hurricane holes in the Caribbean — you can take a large vessel deep inside and be surrounded by hills on every side. A dockyard was built there in the eighteenth century to exploit exactly that, and the remarkable thing is that it never fell out of use: the stone capstan house, sail loft pillars, officers' quarters and boat houses still stand, restored, and the basin in front of them is full of working yachts rather than exhibits. It is UNESCO-listed and it functions simultaneously as a heritage site, a marina, a customs post and a village with restaurants and bars, which is a combination you will not find anywhere else in the region. Antigua is one of the Caribbean's great sailing centres because of this harbour, and the season peaks with a famous spring regatta and a classic-yacht meeting that fill the anchorage with rigs worth crossing the island to see. Even without any interest in boats, the walk around the dockyard is the single best hour on Antigua.

The ridge above English Harbour carries a lookout with what is probably the best view in the eastern Caribbean: the two harbours below, the whole southern coast, and on a clear day the peaks of Montserrat and Guadeloupe. It is worth going at any time, and on Sunday evenings it becomes an institution — steel pan early, barbecue, a large crowd of residents and visitors, and the sunset as the reason everyone came. Elsewhere on the island, the Atlantic side holds Devil's Bridge, a natural limestone arch cut by the open ocean where the swell drives spray up through blowholes; stand well back, because people underestimate it. Inland, the old sugar estates have left behind a landscape of round stone windmill towers, dozens of them, standing in fields — Betty's Hope has two restored with their sails and machinery, and they read now as industrial archaeology in an agricultural setting. The southwest holds the island's only hills and its patch of rainforest, with a canopy zip line and walking trails up towards the high point.

Barbuda lies about forty kilometres north and is a completely different island: flat, dry, scrub-covered, sparsely populated and almost undeveloped, with a lagoon on its western side and beaches that run for kilometres without a building on them. The sand on parts of the southwestern shore has a genuine pink cast from crushed shell, and the emptiness is the point — this is a place to walk a beach for an hour and meet nobody. The other reason to come is the frigate bird colony in the Codrington Lagoon, one of the largest in the world: thousands of birds nest in the mangrove, and in the breeding season the males inflate scarlet throat pouches to an absurd size. You reach the colony by small boat with a local guide, and it is a genuinely remarkable half-hour. Getting to Barbuda is a short flight or a ferry crossing of about ninety minutes, and the island has limited accommodation and few facilities — most people go for a day, and the ones who stay overnight tend to be emphatic about it afterwards.

V. C. Bird International (ANU) is a few minutes northeast of the capital and is one of the better-connected airports in the eastern Caribbean, with direct service from North America and Europe and regional hops to the neighbouring islands. Driving is on the LEFT and a temporary local permit is issued at the rental desk; the island is small enough to circle in a day, though signposting is patchy and a paper map earns its keep. Minibuses run set routes from the two terminals in St John's, cheaply and cheerfully, but stop early in the evening and do not serve the resort strips well. Taxis use fixed published rates, agreed before departure. On seasons: this is a dry island in the hurricane belt, so the reliable window is December to April, with the shoulder months either side offering fewer people and lower prices; the hurricane season runs June to November and peaks late. On money, the Eastern Caribbean dollar is held at a fixed rate against the US dollar rather than floating, so conversion is predictable, and US notes are accepted almost everywhere with change returned in local currency.