Mustique: The Private Island That Became the Caribbean's Most Exclusive Address

Mustique is the Caribbean's most private address, and the privacy is enforced. It is a 1,400-acre island at the southern end of the Grenadines, part of the nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and it is owned and managed by a single company that controls who arrives, who stays, and who may buy one of its roughly one hundred private villas. There is no town, no village, no through traffic. The few roads wind between palms and hidden walls, and the only public gathering place is a beach bar. It is the island where Princess Margaret kept a villa, where Mick Jagger and David Bowie bought homes, and where the definition of Caribbean exclusivity was written.

The Tennant Inheritance

The island was purchased in 1958 by Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner, for £45,000, when it was little more than scrub and a few fishermen's huts. Tennant's genius was to attract exactly the right people. In 1960 he gave Princess Margaret a plot of land as a wedding present, and she built Les Jolies Eaux, a villa at the island's southern tip; her presence drew the royals, the aristocrats, and eventually the rock stars who made Mustique mythic. The stage designer Oliver Messel was brought in to design and influence the villas, giving the island its signature look, whitewashed, romantic, theatrical, the architecture of an English fantasy of the tropics.

The Cotton House and Basil's Bar

There is, technically, a hotel: the Cotton House, a seventeen-room boutique property at the heart of the island, recently restored, with a spa set within a Messel-inspired villa. But the social center of Mustique is Basil's Bar, the wooden beachside institution on Britannia Bay where yacht crews, villa guests, and the occasional off-duty royal gather for sunset. The bar has been the island's living room for fifty years, and a Jump Up, the weekly night of steel-band music and dancing, is the one occasion the island lowers its guard. Beyond the bar, there are nine beaches, a tennis club, horses to ride along the shore, and turtles to swim with before breakfast.

Getting There

There are no commercial flights. Access is by private plane to Mustique Airport (MQS), by yacht, or by inter-island charter from Barbados, St. Vincent, or St. Lucia.

Reference Links:

- Mustique (official island site): mustique-island.com

- Mustique (Wikipedia): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustique