02 May 2024

Antigua

We offer a wide choice of cheap flights to Antigua together with Antigua hotels, tours and self-drive itineraries.

Other Caribbean Reviews

Nelson got it wrong, Antigua is fab

The caribbean island where celebrities are all part of the experience ( you should hear Rob sing it's praises) - as starstruck Frank Barrett found out.

1 Jumby Bay Beach 2 Luxury at Carlisle Bay 3 Nelsons Dockyard

YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE last week,’ said Jumby Bay resort managing director Peter Bowling, ‘Rod Stewart dropped in.’ Rod had been cruising off the island on his yacht and ferried himself ashore to have dinner at the resort’s Estate House restaurant with his girlfriend Penny Lancaster.

After dinner, Peter, a keen amateur pianist, asked Rod, as you do, if he’d like to do a couple of songs. ‘We had a good night,’ he says. ‘He sang for over an hour. The guests liked it.’

I bet they did. At most holiday places you have to put up with Rod Stewart karaoke imitators. At Jumby Bay you get the real thing, for nothing.

On holiday people normally take a Ken Follett to read. At Jumby Bay you can have a Ken Follett to talk to. The millionaire novelist has a holiday home here, and apparently plays a mean bass guitar. Shame he wasn’t around for the Rod Stewart jam.

Cricketing legends

To add to the sense of being caught up in some sort of Antiguan parallel celeb universe, one of Antigua’s most popular live bands is New Dread and the Baldhead – a seven-piece outfit which improbably features West Indian cricketing legends Curtly Ambrose and Richie Richardson on bass guitar and rhythm plank.

‘Oh man,’ said my taxi driver. ‘They do a great version of Hotel California, only with words about Antigua.’ A Welsh tourist I met at the airport told me how he’d played beach cricket at his hotel with Richie Richardson as his team’s captain. ‘That has to be a tale for the grandkids.’

I’d been through Antigua a few times before, always in transit to somewhere else in the Caribbean, and I found the airport so awful that it had put me off visiting the island.

But in the Caribbean there’s a law that says that the quality of the island is in inverse proportion to the quality of the airport: the worse the airport, the better the island.

You don’t have to wander too far from Antigua airport before you realise that this is the glorious Caribbean island you’d always dreamed about.

With a population of about 60,000, it’s fairly compact. Driving from one end to the other is unlikely to take more than 30 minutes. So within an hour of touching down at the airport you can be unpacking in your hotel.

Famous Visitors

The service is charming and politely efficient. I would have thought it impossible to find fault. But the island’s most famous visitor hated the place – and we’re talking more famous than Rod Stewart of course.

Horatio Nelson may be celebrated on Antigua – the restored dockyard at English Harbour was named in his honour in 1961 – but the admiral himself wasn’t too thrilled with the island. When based there from 1784 to 1787 he cheerily described the place as ‘a vile spot’ and ‘this infernal hole’. If only he could return now, he would revise his view.

Nelson’s disenchantment with Antigua is unflinchingly spelt out in the excellent museum at Nelson’s Dockyard which is an impressive National Trust-esque piece of restoration. The museum doesn’t spare British sensitivities. One Royal Naval action, for example, is described as ‘yet another example of British exploitation of its Empire’.

The dockyard is a fine example of how to separate tourists from their cash as delightfully as possible; excellent shops, restaurants, a fine inn and a good-looking hotel.

On Caribbean islands, places to visit as good as Nelson’s Dockyard are a bonus, because for most people the beach is the thing. On Jumby Bay, an island resort about ten minutes boat ride from the mainland, you can have a wonderful beach more or less to yourself.

High Rolling Residents

And Jumby Bay’s tax-free status attracts high-rolling residents. New houses are going up at a cost in excess of £6million. One lavish property, for instance, has been designed to look like an African Village.

You can rent the house and apartments on the island, but even if I had £6million I would still prefer to stay in the hotel – the rooms are excellent and the restaurant is as good as anything you’ll find anywhere in the Caribbean. After decades of relative neglect, Antigua is becoming very trendy. One new hotel is the Carlisle Bay, built by Gordon Campbell Gray, the man behind One Aldwych in London.

With the exception of Chris Blackwell’s Island Outpost hotels, there have been surprisingly few new boutique hotels opening in the Caribbean over the last ten years.

The new Carlisle Bay emphasises what can be achieved with the right planning and thoughtful design. This may seem like an obvious point, but, for example, in Carlisle Bay all the rooms face the sea.

Aware of Antigua’s rapidly rising stock, airlines have been quick to lay on extra flights. Leave London on BA’s 10am flight, arrive in Antigua at 3pm local time and, thanks to the island’s compactness, by 4pm you could be sampling your first rum punch from the comfort of your sunlounger.

Then by 6pm you could be playing beach cricket with Richie Richardson… or enjoying a very live rendition of Rod Stewart’s greatest hits. How can you possibly resist?

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