ABOUT ST BARTS

Work in progress.


St Barts is all you have read and more. When I first visited St Barts in 1990 it was only my second time in the Caribbean. I had been to Guadeloupe the year before but nothing prepared me for the wonderful personality of St Barts and their people.

A Short History

1493 Discovered by Columbus. 1648 First settlement by French. 1650 sold to the Knights of Malta. 1656 Retaken by the Carib Indians. 1758 Captured by the British. 1763 Settled by French from Normandy and Brittany. 1784 sold to Sweeden for a trading possession and became a free port. 1878 sold back to France.

 

It's a small island and has about 8000 inhabitants. Tourism is its only major income and attracts 70,000 visitors every year to its luxury hotels and villas and another 130,000 people arrive by luxury boats.

The event that changed St Barthelemy from what it was to one of the most desired vacation spots in the world was the arrival of the first plane. The pilot was Rémy de Haenen. The year 1946.  In 1953 he purchased the Eden Rock for a few hundred dollars, which he sold in 1995. He was Mayor from 1962 to 1977. The island received electricity around 1961, tourism began in the 1960s and the first cars arrived on St Barts between 1961 and 1963.

In 1957 David Rockefeller bought two plots of land, one on Gouveneur Beach and also the land surrounding the bay of Grand Colombier. The Rothschild family built an estate next door to what beacame the Hôtel Guanahani. The jet set followed and some of the first to discover St Barts were Greta Garbo (now 86), Howard Hugues and Robert Mitchum.

St Barts Today

Your first visit