Antigua

Why Here for Your Honeymoon

Antigua makes a promise no other Caribbean island dares: 365 beaches, one for every day of the year. For honeymooners, that translates into a kind of arithmetic luxury — a different stretch of powder sand for breakfast walks, sunset swims, and the lazy afternoons in between. The water here is the textbook Caribbean palette: glassy turquoise in the shallows, deepening to ink-blue offshore, with reef close enough to snorkel from most resort jetties. But Antigua is more than a beach catalog. English Harbour, on the south coast, is the only working Georgian-era dockyard left in the world, a UNESCO site where Nelson once careened his ships and where superyachts now bob between stone warehouses turned into rum bars. Climb the hill above it on a Sunday evening and you find Shirley Heights, where steel drums, jerk chicken smoke, and a sunset over twin harbours have been the island's weekly ritual for forty years. The honeymoon hotel scene leans heavily adults-only and small-scale: Hermitage Bay's hillside cottages, Galley Bay's barefoot luxe, Curtain Bluff's old-school glamour, Cocos and Cocobay perched on cliffsides, and the private-island fantasy of Jumby Bay. Sailors love Antigua for its trade winds and protected anchorages — Sailing Week in late April fills the bays with regatta crews. Slip away on a day charter to Pillars of Hercules, the wave-carved limestone columns south of English Harbour, or to the calm sandbar of Stingray City.