02 May 2024

 

St Lucia

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

I Love Lucia!

The stars are beginning to flock to this gem of the Caribbean. But Mark Palmers was happy to simply sleep beneath the stars at the hotel that has decided to do away with walls...

St Lucia - Seven storeys high St Lucia - Views from your private ‘sanctuary’ St Lucia - Chef Allen

1 Seven storeys high 2 Views from your private ‘sanctuary’ 3 Chef Allen

SO, WHERE ARE THE CURTAINS?, an American couple asked the manager on arriving in their room at Jade Mountain. There were none – or blinds or shutters for that matter – because the rooms at this much-talked- about landmark on the island of St Lucia have no windows.

They have no windows because they have no outside walls. Guests are open to the balmy Caribbean elements. This means you might share your breakfast with a passing starling, and if it’s raining and there’s a stiff breeze your room gets wet around the edges.

But you also get astonishing views of the iconic twin peaks of the Pitons which amount to the most spectacular hotel setting I have ever come across.

My wife welled-up when she first walked in and stared at nature’s masterpiece. It almost set off the sprinklers for me, too.

No wonder the Pitons have been given UNESCO World Heritage status and St Lucia is being heralded as the Caribbean’s rising star.

St Lucia has always had acres upon acres of unspoilt rainforest, stunning beaches, translucent water and the friendliest of people: now it also boasts trendy boutique hotels, glamorous restaurants and five-star luxury resorts to add to the heady mix.

With a spate of high-end resorts recently opened or under construction, and with ‘Villas for Sale’ signs sprouting like calabash trees, private helicopter pads are becoming a growth market just as the banana trade is dipping.

Nicolas Cage, Harrison Ford, Oprah Winfrey and our own Carol Vorderman all have houses here and there is a growing number of direct flights to and from the UK.

‘The government has found a good balance between encouraging development and protecting the island from any excesses,’ says Nick Troubetzkoy, an affable Canadian architect who came to work here in 1970 and never left.


‘My idea was to create something no one had thought possible before, but one that gives guests the feeling that they have entered a private sanctuary integrated into the island’s ecology.’ The something to which he refers is extraordinary Jade Mountain, just outside the quaint, unspoilt town of Soufriere, on the southwest coast.

Seven storeys high

It is built on and around a rock above Troubetzkoy’s Anse Chastanet resort and is seven storeys. There are few right angles and the suites (known as sanctuaries) are reached by a walkway.

All have their own infinity pool. There are no telephones, TVs or audio equipment and at turn-down a poem is left on your pillow, rather than a chocolate mint.

Staff are unfailingly cheerful and if you don’t have a tennis partner the French general manager will be only too pleased to oblige.

From the outside, this futuristic structure has been described as like an unfinished NCP car park and I understand why. But give the shrubs and creepers a couple of years to run riot and Troubetzkoy’s vision should be complete.

There’s much to do at Anse Chastanet. There are two beaches, both with grey volcanic sand. One of them, Anse Mamin, is largely deserted but behind it is the old sugar plantation complete with abandoned stone buildings, where slaves once toiled.

You'll never forget them

It’s here the energetic begin their jungle biking while others join an informal tour led by Meno, the resident botanist. We opted for the latter and were amazed by Meno’s knowledge of the herbs, plants and wildlife that have made this island their home.


Anse Chastanet is also a scuba-diver’s dream. But we hired a 4x4 (you need one to drive in St Lucia) to explore.

Marigot Bay is worth a visit. This is where the original Doctor Dolittle was filmed in 1967, starring Rex Harrison.

Fish Friday in nearby Anse-La- Ray must not be missed. It’s really a street party, where anyone with anything to sell sets up a stall.

We ate delicious red snapper, cooked in foil on a portable barbecue, and drank ice-cold Piton beer – one of the week’s best meals.

Nearby is La Soufriere Sulphur Springs, a bizarre drive-in volcano featuring steaming, bubbling pools of sulphur-dense water and green and yellow-tinged rocks.

Back at Jade Mountain, we enjoyed something called the Anse Chastanet Forget The Outside World treatment, much more than just a massage. And then to fall asleep with the Pitons watching over you and with a canopy of stars as your ceiling has to be one of life’s greatest pleasures.

Playwright and poet Derek Walcott, St Lucia’s golden boy, waxed so lyrically about these two peaks – formed by a volcanic eruption some 35-million years ago – that it helped win him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

For the rest of us, there is the simple assurance that once you have seen them with your own eyes, you will never forget them.

This article was featured in the October 2008 DialAFlight magazine. All information was correct at time of going to print.

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