Mustique, the manicured island for the rich and famous

Mustique is a small island—less than 5km long—and quite unique in several ways. In the 1960s, when St. Vincent and the Grenadines was still a British colony, the whole island was bought by some guy, Lord Something-or-Other, who had the lucrative idea of creating The Mustique Company to “develop a private island hideaway for the rich and famous”. In a master stroke of business genius he gave a plot to Princess Margaret. Media attention followed and soon the rich and famous started flocking to Mustique, either building their own mansions or coming to one of many for-rent villas that offer a “world class [sic] degree of modern luxury” (too bad The Mustique Company didn’t hire a world-class website developer who would better know to hyphenate compound adjectives).

The island is somewhat open to mortal cruisers like us, if you are willing to pay a “conservation fee” for the privilege of bringing your boat to the anchorage. Strangely enough, you pay for blocks of three nights, so if for instance you stay four nights, you pay six anyway. And then you receive a list of rules and a map. The rules warn you that the rich-and-famous residents value being rich over being famous, because they care very much about their privacy and don’t like tourists pointing cameras to them. The map shows where in the island you can go ashore, and that’s essentially the village and Brittania Bay. However, if you pay for a taxi tour, the driver is allowed to take you to more places. And if you rent a villa, you can wander freely anywhere you want. They managed to create their own system of castes. For the top caste “there are no rules […] guests can simply do as they wish“.

Large areas of the island have been left untouched as nature reserves. We hiked a trail around a lagoon (inside the area allowed to our caste). It was a splendid trail that meandered under the shade of old trees, but something seemed odd, something you wouldn’t notice until you consciously tried to understand why you have that nagging feeling that there’s something dissonant. It was the trail itself. It was immaculately clean because it had just been raked.

We had initially decided against the taxi tour around the island until an overenthusiastic group of people from a charter boat, just coming off the tour, convinced us otherwise. Not that we regret it, since we got to visit a couple of delightful beaches, but the tour was very close to what we had expected. “This is the library… there’s the statue of the founder of the Mustique Company… this is the airport… that roof over there is Mick Jagger’s house… this is the entrance to Bryan Adams’ retreat… that’s the villa where William and Kate honeymooned”. We are spoiled. We need more than that to get impressed. And who is Bryan Adams anyway?

The best part of Mustique, and we’d happily go again just for that, was the anchorage: protected, calm, quiet and secluded. Above water we had a wonderful view of the beach, and below water a world-class reef at a short swim distance.