St. John, USVI: Virgin Islands National Park & the Rockefeller Legacy of Caneel Bay

St. John is the smallest of the three United States Virgin Islands, and roughly two-thirds of it doesn't belong to anyone, it belongs to the national park. In 1956, the philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller, having cruised into the island's bays and decided they were too beautiful to develop, donated more than five thousand acres to the American people. That gift became Virgin Islands National Park, and it is the reason that St. John, alone among the developed Caribbean islands, has kept its green hills and empty beaches essentially intact. The island is an American territory, bought from Denmark in 1917, and its residents are American citizens. No passport is required for Americans.

Trunk Bay and the Park

Trunk Bay is the most photographed beach in the park and, by common consent, one of the most beautiful in the Caribbean, a quarter-mile crescent of white sand between two green headlands, with an underwater snorkeling trail marked by plaques along the reef. The park covers about sixty percent of St. John's land area and much of its surrounding waters, protecting coral reefs, mangrove shorelines, and the ruins of colonial sugar plantations. The Reef Bay Trail descends through the rainforest to the petroglyphs left by the pre-Columbian Taíno people and to a restored sugar factory at the water's edge, a single walk that compresses a thousand years of the island's history.

Caneel Bay

On the northwest coast sits Caneel Bay, the resort Rockefeller built in 1956 as the model for barefoot, design-led Caribbean luxury. He held back a 150-acre peninsula for the resort while donating the surrounding land to the park, a private enclave within a public one, run under a retained-use agreement that expired in 2023. The National Park Service is now planning the bay's next chapter, a rare moment of reinvention for one of the most storied pieces of coastline in the American Caribbean. Whatever rises there, the seven beaches of Caneel, each a perfect crescent of sand, remain the soul of St. John.

Getting There

Fly into Cyril E. King Airport (STT) on St. Thomas, then a twenty-minute ferry from Red Hook or Charlotte Amalie across the Pillsbury Sound to Cruz Bay, St. John's only town.

Reference Links:

- Virgin Islands National Park (NPS): nps.gov/viis

- Caneel Bay (NPS): nps.gov/viis/caneelbay.htm

- US Virgin Islands (official tourism): visitusvi.com

- Virgin Islands National Park (Wikipedia): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Islands_National_Park