Carambola Beach Resort

The Hotel

Carambola Beach Resort occupies 28 acres on Davis Bay, the half-mile crescent of white sand pressed between the rainforest hills and the Caribbean on St. Croix's north shore. The original property was conceived in the late 1960s by Laurance Rockefeller (the same family arm that established Caneel Bay on St. John and the Mauna Kea on Hawaii's Big Island) as a low-rise resort designed to disappear into the landscape, an aesthetic the current Renaissance-flagged operation still largely preserves. The drive in, from the Henry E. Rohlsen airport over the centre of the island to the rainforest road that drops down to Davis Bay, is the longest of any St. Croix resort transfer; it is also the most theatrical, and sets the tone for everything that follows.

The 151 accommodations are configured as one-bedroom suites in low two-storey blocks tucked among the palms, there is no high-rise on the property and no building more than two storeys from the sand. Each suite is roughly 700 square feet with a king or two doubles, a sitting room with rattan furniture, and a full balcony or patio that faces either the bay or the gardens. The bay-view suites in buildings 1 through 4 are the working booking; the garden suites are cheaper and quieter but ten metres further from the water. The aesthetic is honest Caribbean, terracotta tile, white walls, mahogany louvres, ceiling fans paired with air conditioning, rather than the cool grey contemporary palette of the Loren or Rosewood on Bermuda.

The beach is the central asset and the central reason to book. Davis Bay is a half-mile crescent of unraked white sand with a coral reef break a few hundred yards offshore, the snorkeling at the eastern end of the bay is the best of any developed beach on the island, and the sea-turtle nesting season (April through October) brings hatchlings to the same stretch of sand on quiet nights. The resort runs a beach kiosk for kayaks, paddleboards and the snorkel-gear rentals; certified diving runs out of the adjacent Cane Bay village 10 minutes east, which is the centre of Caribbean wall-diving. Five minutes inland the Carambola Golf Club, designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr. and consistently ranked among the top three courses in the Caribbean, extends an unrushed, well-priced playing day for resort guests.

Dining is a three-outlet operation: Saman (the all-day main restaurant, breakfast buffet and Caribbean-fusion dinner with an open kitchen and a small wine list), Flamboyant (the beachfront lunch and casual-dinner bar, the better of the two for sunset), and Mahogany (the cocktail bar in the lobby pavilion, with live local music three nights a week). The wine programme is brand-standard rather than ambitious; the rum list, by contrast, runs to thirty estate-bottled selections from Cruzan (the on-island distillery, 25 minutes south), Foursquare in Barbados, and the harder-to-find single-cask bottlings the bar manager has been collecting since the post-storm rebuild. Service is the slightly inconsistent Caribbean four-star standard, warm and unrushed at its best, slow in the breakfast rush, but the staff retention rate is high and the depth of local knowledge unusual for the Marriott portfolio.

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