Meads Bay

There is a particular quality of light that hits the west-facing beaches of the Caribbean in the last hour before dark, and Meads Bay has the best position in Anguilla to receive it. I walked down to the water around five o’clock on my second afternoon there and found the beach almost empty — just a handful of couples far apart on the sand, everyone facing the same direction with the absorbed attention of people watching something worth watching. The sea had gone from turquoise to bronze, then to something molten and orange, and the palm trees at the water’s edge were backlit into silhouettes that looked almost theatrical.

Meads Bay is on the northwest coast, about three kilometres long and protected from the prevailing trade winds just enough that the water stays calmer than the beaches further east. Several of the island’s most celebrated luxury properties sit along its upper shore — Malliouhana perched on the cliff above the southern end, Carimar lower down near the water — but the beach itself is public and wide enough that the presence of these places does not crowd or colonize it. I spent mornings there when the hotel guests were still at breakfast and had the whole western half of the bay to myself.

Blanchard’s is the restaurant that gets mentioned most often in the same breath as Meads Bay, and it deserves its reputation not because it is spectacular in the way that show-off restaurants are spectacular, but because it is quietly excellent and consistent — a rarer achievement. I ate there once, a snapper ceviche with a passion fruit and scotch bonnet dressing, followed by Caribbean lobster that had been doing nothing complicated in its preparation except benefiting from being caught very recently. The dining room is open to a garden, ceiling fans turning overhead, and the cumulative effect was of someone’s particularly well-run house rather than a restaurant.

The beach at Meads Bay rewards early risers. By six-thirty in the morning, the sand has been raked and the bar umbrellas are not yet up and the light is completely different — cooler, more silver, the water a deeper green. I swam out fifty meters and floated on my back for twenty minutes and could hear, very faintly, music coming from somewhere on the shore. It turned out to be someone’s phone playing calypso, almost too quiet to identify, carried out to me by a breath of offshore wind.

There is a small beach bar at the northern end called Jacala — simple tables in the sand, not much shade, but the rum drinks come with fresh fruit and the staff have the relaxed confidence of people who know exactly what they are doing. On the afternoon I was there, a small dog slept under my table for an hour, untroubled by anything.

When to go: Meads Bay is best in February and March, when the west-facing aspect catches the clearest sunsets and the water is at its most transparent. Come at six o’clock for the light, stay for dinner at Blanchard’s, and accept that you may not want to leave.