I’ve sent clients to a lot of Caribbean islands over the years, and St Barts still throws me a little every time. It’s tiny. You can practically see across it from a hilltop. And yet it manages to be two completely different places at once: barefoot, salty, goats-on-the-hillside Caribbean on one side, and full-on glamour on the other, with nothing awkward about the join.

You notice it most from a yacht, actually. Pull into a bay in the morning and you might have it entirely to yourself, just pelicans and clear water. By evening you’re in Gustavia, tenders going back and forth between yachts well over a hundred metres, restaurant terraces packed with people who very clearly did not fly in for a quiet week. Not many places pull off both moods without one cancelling the other out. It’s a big part of why, of all the Caribbean

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