There is a small bridge on the island of Saint-Martin that crosses from one nation into another without ceremony, without passport control, without even a change in the colour of the road surface. On one side, the tricolour of France. On the other, the red, white, and blue of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The island has been shared between these two powers since 1648, when, according to a legend of magnificent implausibility, a Frenchman and a Dutchman settled the boundary by walking in opposite directions from a central point, each covering as much ground as he could before meeting again on the other side. The Frenchman, the story goes, drank wine; the Dutchman, gin. The Frenchman walked faster and claimed the larger share. Whether the story is true matters less than what it reveals: this is an island that has always understood the art of civilised coexistence, and has made that art the foundation of everything remarkable about it.
Two Cultures, One Paradise
Saint-Martin and Sint Maarten — French and Dutch names for the same thirty-seven-square-mile territory — offer the visitor something genuinely rare in the Caribbean: the collision of two distinct European cultural traditions, each expressed with its full character rather than diluted into a generalised holiday resort aesthetic. The French side, Saint-Martin, governed from Guadeloupe and since 2007 a separate collectivity of France, brings to the island the particular seriousness about food, the elegant casualness of dress, the cafe culture and the patisserie and the wine list that the metropolitan traveller recognises immediately and gratefully. The Dutch side, Sint Maarten, an autonomous country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, offers by contrast the lively, commercial, duty-free energy of Philipsburg: casinos and cruise-ship berths and a Front Street dense with jewellery and electronics and the unencumbered purchasing pleasure of a port without import taxes.
Grand Case: The Gastronomic Capital of the Caribbean
The small fishing village of Grand Case, on the French side’s northwestern coast, has been making extravagant claims to the title of Caribbean gastronomic capital for several decades, and the evidence increasingly supports those claims. The village’s single main street — Boulevard de Grand Case — runs parallel to a turquoise bay and is lined on both sides with restaurants of a quality that would be remarkable in any context and is extraordinary in this one. French technique applied to Caribbean ingredients produces here a cuisine of peculiar and compelling excellence: a ceviche of local conch in coconut milk and lime that balances the acid and the sweet with the precision of a skilled perfumer; a grilled whole red snapper basted in a compound butter of local herbs and Scotch bonnet that achieves the particular balance of heat and richness that the French call équilibre; a rum baba soaked in aged rhum agricole from Martinique and served with a vanilla crème Chantilly that makes the Parisian version seem slightly beside the point.
The Beaches: A Study in Contrast
The island’s beaches are as various as its cultures. Orient Bay, on the French side’s eastern coast, is the island’s most celebrated strand: a kilometre and a half of white sand backed by a shallow turquoise lagoon that offers windsurfing and kite-surfing alongside the more contemplative pleasures of a beach chair and a rum punch. Maho Bay, on the Dutch side, offers one of the Caribbean’s most surreal spectacles: aircraft from Princess Juliana International Airport pass so low over the beach on final approach that sunbathers can read the registration numbers on the fuselage. Mullet Bay, nearby, curves in a long, quiet arc with some of the island’s best surf conditions. For the visitor who requires absolute seclusion, the island’s northern coves — Happy Bay, Petite Plage, Friar’s Bay — are accessible by a short hike and offer the rare combination of white sand and empty horizon that has become, in the age of Instagram, something approaching an endangered habitat.
Sint Maarten: The Energy of Commerce
Philipsburg, the Dutch capital, presents a different but equally valid version of the island’s appeal. The Front Street shopping district, running parallel to the Great Bay, is one of the Caribbean’s finest duty-free destinations: jewellery of serious provenance at prices substantially below retail, fine spirits and cigars, electronics and luxury goods available to the cruise-ship visitor for a fraction of their home-country cost. The Back Street, parallel to the Front and less visited, houses the island’s most authentic local restaurants — Johnny’s Kitchen, Turtle Pie Co. — where the cooking is Antillean in the most unpretentious sense: stewed saltfish, fungi, peas and rice, Johnny cake. Eat here, in a plastic chair beside a ceiling fan, and understand that the island’s soul exists at this level as fully as it does in any Grand Case dining room.
The Water: The Island’s Greatest Luxury
Everything that is most extraordinary about Saint-Martin ultimately returns to the water. The Caribbean Sea on the island’s western coast — sheltered, warm, a shade of blue that painters have spent centuries trying to name — is among the finest sailing waters in the world, and the island has cultivated a yachting culture of corresponding sophistication. The annual Heineken Regatta draws fleets of international competitors to its waters each March; the marinas of Marigot and Simpson Bay host year-round a collection of private yachts whose combined displacement represents a remarkable concentration of the world’s floating wealth. Charter a day on the water — to Pinel Island, to Tintamarre, to the smaller cays that lie offshore and offer snorkelling of extraordinary clarity — and understand that on this island, the journey between points of interest is not a transition but an experience of equal worth to the destination.
An Island Without a Border
What makes Saint-Martin ultimately singular is what that unmarked border in the middle of the island actually means. It means that a single day can begin with a café crème and a pain au chocolat in a Marigot patisserie, proceed through a morning of duty-free shopping in Philipsburg, include a long lunch of French Caribbean cuisine in Grand Case, an afternoon on Orient Bay, and an evening at a Sint Maarten casino or rooftop bar, all without the friction of immigration or the cost of currency exchange. It is an island that has resolved, through the accident of its history, the question of how to offer everything — and managed, remarkably, to do it with grace.