Necker Island
"It's the one island in the BVI I could only look at from a boat, and somehow that made it more interesting, not less."
Richard Branson's 74-acre private island north of Virgin Gorda, rebuilt after fire and hurricanes into a Balinese-roofed retreat where lemurs roam and the whole island can only ever hold one group of guests.
I never set foot on Necker Island, and that’s more or less the point of it — Richard Branson bought this 74-acre lump of granite and scrub off North Sound in 1978 for a reported 180,000 dollars, on something close to a whim, and it has since become one of the most private and expensive escapes in the Caribbean, rented out whole to one group at a time rather than by the room. From a boat drifting past its northern shore, I could make out the Balinese-style great house on the hilltop, all steep thatched roofs and open-air pavilions, rebuilt after a 2011 fire destroyed the original and again after Hurricane Irma tore through in 2017. Branson has said he wants Necker to survive him as a kind of living retreat rather than a museum, and standing off the reef looking up at it, it did feel less like a mansion and more like a small self-contained world.
What I found more interesting than the celebrity roster the island attracts is what’s been done with the land itself — Necker has been turned into something of a private wildlife sanctuary, with ring-tailed and red-ruffed lemurs imported from Madagascar roaming freely, giant tortoises brought over from Aldabra, and flamingos wading a small lagoon, all part of a broader effort to make the island a haven for endangered species that has, by most accounts, actually worked. Our boat captain, who’d worked these waters for twenty years, pointed out where the reef breaks hardest on the north side and said he’d ferried more than one very famous face across this same stretch of water without ever quite being able to say who.
You can’t just show up. But sailing past it, watching that impossible roofline sit above the turquoise like something out of a different kind of travel story entirely, was its own small pleasure — the BVI’s strangest landmark, viewed strictly from the outside.
When to go: There’s no public access; you’ll see it from a boat charter or day sail through North Sound. Renting the island itself requires booking the whole property, typically well over a year in advance.