Pinney's Beach

Pinney’s Beach is Nevis’ great social equalizer, which sounds paradoxical given that one end of it is occupied by a Four Seasons Resort. But the beach itself is public and wide — five kilometers of it running north from Charlestown along the Caribbean coast — and on a Sunday afternoon it belongs entirely to the island. I arrived around three o’clock to find family groups spread under coconut palms, children running at the waves, men standing waist-deep in the water talking, someone’s speaker playing soca at a volume calibrated for the outdoors.

The water here is the kind of color that makes you doubt the evidence of your own eyes when you first see it — a particular turquoise that comes from the combination of white sand bottom, shallow depth, and the right angle of Caribbean afternoon light. I swam for a long time, longer than I had planned, because the water was warm and perfectly clear and the beach had reached a state of agreeable Sunday abundance that made it genuinely hard to leave.

The local beach bars are the real reason to be here. Sunshine’s Bar is the most famous — a bright yellow institution that has been on this beach for decades, serving Killer Bee rum punch in large cups with an informality that is entirely its own style of hospitality. The recipe involves rum, fruit juice, and apparently a quantity of nutmeg that gives the aftertaste something distinctive. I was warned about the strength. I underestimated it. Two is enough.

South of Sunshine’s, a row of smaller bars and restaurants lines the beach road: fried fish, chicken and rice, local juices, beer in a bucket of ice. The palm trees here are old — properly old, their trunks curved and thick and salt-bleached — and the shade they produce has a quality different from newer trees, deeper and more complete. I sat under one with a Carib for an hour before the light changed and the beach started emptying as families packed up their coolers for the drive home.

Further north, the beach becomes quieter, the development thinner, and eventually you are walking along a stretch of coast where it is just the palm trees and the Caribbean and you. Nevis Peak is always visible to the east, its cloud riding low as usual.

When to go: Sunday afternoons for the full social scene. Weekday mornings for solitude and the best snorkeling, when the water has settled overnight. The dry season (December to April) brings the most consistent weather and the flattest sea. Either way, bring sun protection — the palms cast patchy shade and the Caribbean light is serious.