Palm Island
"Every palm on this island exists because one man decided the mosquito-ridden scrub deserved a second chance."
A once-barren cay near Union Island that an American sailor replanted palm by palm in the 1960s, now a private resort island ringed by sand.
The short ferry ride from Union Island to Palm Island takes about ten minutes, which is roughly the amount of time it takes to go from a bustling, slightly scruffy Grenadines hub to something that feels entirely apart from it. Palm Island is tiny — you can walk its perimeter in under an hour — and almost every tree that gives it its name was planted deliberately, which is a stranger story than it sounds.
In the 1960s, an American sailor named John Caldwell leased what was then known as Prune Island, a mangrove-choked, mosquito-plagued cay with almost no vegetation worth mentioning, and spent years personally planting coconut palms across it by hand, transforming a nearly uninhabitable spit of sand into the shaded, palm-lined island you see today. He renamed it Palm Island for obvious reasons. It’s since become a private resort, but the beaches ringing it remain some of the finest sand I encountered anywhere in the Grenadines — Casuarina Beach in particular, on the eastern side, catching the trade winds and staying pleasantly cool even at midday.
Day-trippers from Union Island are welcome to visit the beaches even without staying at the resort, and I’d recommend it — bring cash for a beachside lunch, rent a snorkel from the small dive shop, and spend an afternoon on sand that somehow still feels underused despite being a short boat ride from one of the Grenadines’ busier islands. The water just offshore has decent reef structure, and turtles are a regular enough sighting that nobody on the beach seemed particularly excited when one surfaced near the swimming area.
There’s a quiet irony to Palm Island that I appreciated: an island transformed almost entirely by one stubborn person’s decades of manual labor, now marketed as an untouched paradise. Both things are true simultaneously, and knowing the history made the palm trees themselves more interesting than the marketing copy ever could.
When to go: Any time in the dry season, December through May, for calm ferry crossings from Union Island and the clearest water for snorkeling around Casuarina Beach.