The United States Virgin Islands offer you three shades of a Caribbean paradise. Whether you like shopping and mingling, communing with nature or discovering hidden places with your sun and sand vacations, the distinct islands of St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix give you unique experiences that you’ll treasure.
Situated 1,100 miles southeast of Florida and just 50 miles east of Puerto Rico, this archipelago was originally inhabited by Arawak, Taino, Carib and Ciboney tribes, before Christopher Columbus explored it in 1493. He named the isles after Saint Ursula and her virgins – and for the next 400 years Spain, the U.K, the Netherlands, France and Denmark reigned, embedding their cultures, until the U.S. purchased the islands in 1917, for $25 million. Today this unincorporated U.S. Territory is home to people of African, European and American ancestry and is a mecca to millions of vacationers.
St. Thomas – Cruising, Shopping and People Watching St. Thomas is the Caribbean’s most popular cruise ship port. Several days a week, tourists pour off Carnival and Royal Caribbean cruise ships, swelling the island’s population of 51,000 and inundating the former Danish warehouses that are now duty free shops along Main Street in the harbour city of Charlotte Amalie. Once a bastion for pirates like Blackbeard, then a West Indies slave trading center, the city evolved to a coaling station for ships journeying through the Americas in the 1800s. Then Charlotte Amalie became a haven for freed blacks who found jobs as clerks, shopkeepers and artisans and worked at the former warehouses that now sell discounted Rolex watches, Gucci bags and Ray-Ban sunglasses.
Traffic jams are common. The night life is lively. Restaurants abound. For fi ne dining, the Bleuwater restaurant at The Ritz-Carlton, St. Thomas overlooks Great Bay and features fresh seafood and prime cuts. Tourists swear by the cuisine at Gladys’s Café in Royal Dane Mall, which includes local specialties such as conch and fungi, salt fish and dumplings, mutton stew and famous Bloody Mary’s. But the locals head to the Atlantic Seafood Café, which sits on a hill on the St. Thomas airport grounds. Cab drivers park their taxis, play cards or dominoes and debate which is the better tasting fried fish, red snapper or the Old Wife. (Hint, Old Wife is delectable and has fewer small bones!)
Away from the hustle and bustle of shoppers and traffic, on the northern side of the 13-mile long, 4-mile wide island, over the steep hills that were once formed by volcanoes, there’s Magen’s Bay Beach, a huge U-shaped shoreline with soft white sands and clear, still, waist-high waters. Swimming here is like swimming in the world’s largest pool. Sometimes the beach is crowded with cruise ship passengers. Other times it’s nearly empty. For more privacy try Sapphire or Coki beaches. For adventure take the Ecotour excursion to Hassel Island, or sample the nightlife in the eastern town of Red Hook (East End Café or XO Wine Bar) or take a ferry to Water Island, known as the 4th Virgin Island. Catching the sun as it disappears over the hills behind Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas is a daily treat and you can get a great glimpse from the Windows Harbour restaurant at Marriott’s Frenchman’s Reef.
