Peter Island

Peter Island is the largest privately owned island in the BVI — around five square miles of volcanic hillside, five beaches, and the kind of considered quiet that develops when a place has been managed as a resort destination for decades and has arrived, through that process, at something that feels almost like its original self. I came by water taxi from Road Town, a twenty-minute ride across the Drake Channel in the late afternoon, and tied up at the dock at Deadman’s Bay as the light was going long and orange. The beach was empty except for two pelicans conducting what appeared to be a territorial negotiation on a piece of driftwood.

Deadman’s Bay is the main beach, and its name — which sounds like it should belong to a place with a more dramatic history than it has — turns out to be a mistranslation or corruption of a Dutch name that meant something unremarkable about the shape of the bay. None of this matters standing there. The beach runs three hundred meters in a clean arc, backed by low scrub and the steep green hill that forms the island’s spine. The sand is white enough that it reflects light from below and the water above it glows in a way that seems implausible past a certain point. I went swimming alone at four in the afternoon and the visibility in the water was good enough to see the sandy bottom six meters down as clearly as through glass.

The other beaches — Little Deadman’s Bay, Sprat Bay, White Bay on the windward side — each have a slightly different character. White Bay faces the open Atlantic and on days when the northerly swell is up, the surf runs along the reef and the sound of it reaches the leeward side of the island as a low continuous rumble. The trails that connect the bays are well-maintained and switchback over the central ridge, and from the high points you get the full geography of the southern BVI laid out in one view: Cooper Island and Salt Island to the north, Norman Island to the west, the hazy mass of St. John visible across the Narrows in the far distance. Peter Island offers the particular pleasure of a place that has limited its own capacity to remain what it is. I arrived grateful and left reluctantly.

When to go: December through April for consistent dry-season conditions. The Peter Island Resort handles most accommodation; day visitors can arrive by water taxi from Road Town with advance arrangement. The windward beaches are worth the hike on calm days; check conditions before crossing the ridge if the swell is up.