Award Winning Jade Mountain and Anse Chastanet Resorts, St Lucia
When I visited southern St Lucia in the Caribbean 10 years ago I wrote an article which claimed that one of the hotels was the sort of place James Bond would choose for his holidays. I mentioned this to the hotel’s owner over lunch at the time and she and her husband invited me to return for a more in-depth visit. Now I have.
It has taken me just over a decade, but my 007 thoughts about the place haven’t changed a jot.
In fact, now that I’ve stayed at the twin resorts of Anse Chastanet and Jade Mountain for the best part of a week, I am convinced that the luxury-loving Bond would fit the place with every bit as much aplomb as a steel fist in a silken glove.
It has everything a movie director working on a Bond production would require: unbelievably dramatic scenery of the kind you could leap off in a microlite if the need was pressing; huge multi-coloured fish-filled reefs in the clear Caribbean waters through which a hero could swim silently and secretly; a massive private estate in the rain-forest that surrounds the two hotels…
Hotels which are so remarkable you know they must have been designed by someone special. In fact, Jade Mountain is regularly named as one of the world’s most beautiful hotels - and often labelled as the top resort in the Caribbean. It is built on a steep slope above a picture-perfect bay and its rooms - or sanctuaries as they are known - have been designed to get the very best out of the stunning view of the iconic twin Piton rock stacks which make up what must be the best known landscape in the tropics.
How do you get the best out of a view? Simple. You do not clutter it with something dark and inconvenient like a wall. None of the sanctuaries at Jade Mountain have a fourth wall - instead there is just an infinity pool, fresh air, and panorama.
And the place was designed by someone special. The architect behind the concept was Jade Mountain’s owner, a Russian-Canadian architect called Nick Troubetzkoy. Back in the early 1970s he arrived in Saint Lucia to work with a group of architects designing vacation villas and, what was meant to be a brief stint in paradise turned into a lifelong passion for the island and its people.
The two hotels in the valley near the town of Soufrière in southern St Lucia now employ no fewer than 550 people and Nick and Karolin Troubetzkoy have a name for being two of the most forward thinking, eco-friendly hoteliers in the Caribbean region. Indeed, Karolin is now president of the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association.
None of which is of particular interest to readers of the WMN, but I mention it here because, for too many years, the Caribbean has been the kind of place where hoteliers concentrate on piling the tourists (mainly American) in and treating them in the kind of way that you can experience anywhere from Miami to Singapore. Same old suites, same old “international” cuisine… The Troubetzkoys do not do this. Instead they embrace what you could describe as “Caribbeanism”.
So much so, that the very warm balmy air of the Caribbean comes wafting in through the big beautiful gap where there would normally be a wall. They are developing their estate to grow all the organic produce which is served in their hotels. They are Southern St Lucia’s biggest employer and have a name for looking after their staff with the kind of employee benefits that are sadly not the norm in the region. And so on…
All of which I mention in a bid to explain that Anse Chastanet and Jade Mountain are not run of the mill resorts. And I’m talking about anywhere, let alone the Caribbean. They are truly, remarkably, stunning. They are expensive, but a stay there is something that a visitor will never forget.
To swim in your own infinity pool to the edge of your own massive sanctuary apartment and peer out over The Pitons is to have your very own James Bond moment. Then you can lean across to the little phone they give you and call your very own butler who will bring you a robe so that you can cross the sanctuary for a rest in a giant four poster bed…
As I say, none of this comes cheap at Jade Mountain. But there are people from my region who can afford it (I know that because I met one in St Lucia) and there’s also that “holiday of a lifetime” ambition for the rest of us.
Far more affordable is a stay at Anse Chastanet just below Jade Mountain and therefore closer to the wonderful cove I mentioned. You won’t get a sanctuary with an infinity pool, but you will get one of the small and charming villas which Mr Troubetzkoy designed after he bought the estate and before he went on to create his Jade Mountain masterpiece.
Indeed, my wife and I were just as happy at Anse Chastanet as we were high above in the butler-serviced home of the gods.
Maybe that was because we love St Lucia. It is one of my favourite islands in the world and is certainly the pick of the bunch for me in the Caribbean, not least because there are almost daily flights there from London with airlines like as Virgin Atlantic.
The south of the island is mountainous, which is what allows for all those wondrous rainforests - the likes of which you do not see on many Caribbean isles. And the area around Soufrière is particularly scenic - partly because of those amazing Pitons, partly because of the great green backdrop which descends to the cove studded coast and partly because…
Well, the area just seems to me to be more Caribbean than anywhere else I know. When I was a child, dreaming of going to such tropical places, this is what I imagined it would be like. And like a lot of boys, a great many of my dreams were inspired by those James Bond movies. Dreams that seem even better having spent time in the place where I reckon 007 would spend his holidays.
FACT FILE
Nightly rates at Anse Chastanet start from £258 per room based on double occupancy. www.ansechastanet.com
Nightly rates at Jade Mountain start from £744 per sanctuary based on double occupancy. Rates in both resorts are subject to 10% service charge and 10% VAT To book visit www.jademountain.com
We flew to St Lucia with Virgin Atlantic (http://www.virgin-atlantic.com) - return flights start at around £560.The official website for the Saint Lucia Tourist Board is www.saintluciauk.org
