St Barthélemy / Things to do

As you would expect from an island just 25 square km, St Barths isn’t big on major attractions. Bijou is the key to this island with an interesting capital town of Gustavia and a handful of historic sites to explore.

Here are a few things to interest you if you take the time to look around the island.

Gustavia

Capital of the island, Gustavia is a very pretty town. The houses clamber over the hillsides above three sides of a rectangular harbour, most of which has wooden boardwalks along its shores, and where anything from dinghies to some of the world’s swankiest yachts tie up. The streets still have pockets of pretty Caribbean authenticity in the stone and wooden buildings, but the air of the place is a small busy French town in the tropics, with some extremely smart shops standing shoulder to shoulder with cafés and municipal buildings.

Gustavia is also the only place where a visible connection remains to the Swedes that owned the island for about a century. St Barthélemy was used by the Swedes mainly as a trading port and once there were warehouses all around the wharfs. Just a few of the original Swedish buildings remain now (the Wall House is the best example) as many were destroyed by hurricane and fire in 1850 and were never rebuilt. Still, some streets retain their oddly exotic sounding names: Droninggatan, Kongsgatan and Ostra and Westra Strandgatan. Look out for the small but distinctive, pyramid-roofed clocktower known as the Swedish Belfry, which was once attached to the Lutheran Church.

Instead the overlay of French culture is far more noticeable nowadays, in the shops – Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Blanc Bleu – in the general way of life, scooters zipping past open-air cafes and in more familiar streetnames on blue enamel plaques: Rue Général de Gaulle and Rue Jeanne d’Arc. It takes less than half an hour to walk around the town.

Gustavia harbour is very attractive as a port, but it is also a sight in itself during the height of the winter season, when a huge number of mind-bogglingly large and glitzy private yachts cruise into town. They stand shoulder to shoulder on the wharf, barely swaying in the water, but teetering on the edge of unconscionable vulgarity. On board parties take place within metres of one another, just on a different multi-million dollar chunk of hardware. If you don’t happen to own one it is still quite impressive to see them berthed.

Gustavia Museum
If you have a moment to tear yourself away from the beach to discover a little bit of St Barths culture, then the main museum is on the western arm of the harbour in Gustavia, set in a restored Swedish warehouse next to the Town Hall. There are some mildly interesting displays of old-time life in St Barths including carved Amerindian stones, maquettes of ships and mock ups of old St Barths ‘cases’, traditional houses with thick rendered walls and tin or straw roofs, and of course the objects of everyday life that were used inside them, including demi-johns for water collection and chinaware. Opening hours, Mon-Thurs, 8.30am-12.30pm and 2.30-6pm except Monday mornings and 9am-1pm on Saturdays.

The Inter Oceans Museum
Set in the local St Barthian area of Corossol, this is more a collection than a museum, and not exactly sexily presented either, just rows and rows and rows of shells from around the world. It is however, wonderfully compulsive, the result of one man’s overweening passion, and an extraordinary display of nature’s truly extraordinary intricacy, beauty and variety. It is impossible to describe, but incalculably beautiful. Only 400 or the 3000 species of shell are from the Caribbean region, but there are several ‘world records’ in size.

For more detailed information see section on Historic Sites under Culture & Heritage and Island Tours.

Contributor: Jane Anderson (Update 2011)