The Dockyard and the Lagoon
Seven days across a two-island state that is 442 square kilometres in total — the Georgian naval dockyard at English Harbour, the sugar estate the whole arrangement was built to feed, the offshore islets where what was once the world's rarest snake was put back one rat-free cay at a time, then the ferry north to Barbuda, its frigatebird colony and the land argument that has been running there since 1685.
St John's
Arrive, collect the hire car and the temporary local driving permit that comes with it, and give the day to the capital. The Museum of Antigua and Barbuda occupies the 1750 court house on Long Street and is small, honest and worth an hour — it is the only place on either island that lays out the Amerindian, sugar and independence sequence in one room. St John's Cathedral, the third church on that site, went up after the 1843 earthquake flattened its predecessor and has spent much of the last decade under restoration, so check whether the interior is open before walking up. If it is Saturday, the public market at the south end of town is the better morning. The town works around the cruise berths at Heritage Quay: on a two or three ship day it holds several thousand extra people and by six in the evening it is close to empty, which is when the streets away from the quay stop being worth walking.
English Harbour
Over the ridge to the south coast. The naval dockyard was begun in the 1720s because English Harbour is a hurricane hole — a deep inlet with a narrow mouth and hills all round it, where the Royal Navy could careen and repair ships without sending them back across the Atlantic. Nelson was based here from 1784 to 1787 as senior officer of the Leeward Islands squadron, enforcing the Navigation Acts against merchants who wanted to trade with the newly independent United States, and was thoroughly disliked for it. The yard closed in 1889 and was restored from 1951 onwards; it now holds working berths, a sail loft and the pillars of the boat house standing without their roof. Walk out to Fort Berkeley on the spit for the view back in, then up to Shirley Heights for the sunset. The Sunday session there — steel pan first, then a band — is the one fixed social event on the Antiguan calendar, and it is not only tourists.
Fig Tree Drive and the interior
The south-west corner is the only part of Antigua with enough rainfall to hold woodland. Fig Tree Drive runs through it — no figs, because fig is the local word for banana — and comes out at Wallings, where a masonry dam built between 1890 and 1900 created the island's first public water supply and the catchment above it was planted with trees to protect the reservoir. It is run now by a local non-profit and the trails from the car park are short and steep. Mount Obama, 402 metres, is the high point of the island and was called Boggy Peak until it was renamed in 2009; the track up is a service road to the telecom masts and the view is of the whole southern half of the country. Swim at Darkwood on the way back, which is roadside; Rendezvous Bay, the one people photograph, is at the end of a rutted track that a standard hire car should not attempt and is otherwise a forty-minute walk in from Old Road.
Betty's Hope, Devil's Bridge and Great Bird Island
North-east across the middle of the island. Betty's Hope was granted to Christopher Codrington in 1674 and is the estate the whole colonial arrangement was organised around — two windmill towers still standing, one restored with sails, and a visitor centre in the old cotton house. Barbuda was leased by the same family eleven years later to feed it, which is the fact to carry north with you on the ferry. Then Devil's Bridge at Indian Town Point, a limestone arch the Atlantic swell has cut through the headland, and Half Moon Bay a little south, a national park whose hotel was destroyed by Hurricane Luis in 1995 and never rebuilt. Finish with a boat from Seatons out into the North Sound to Great Bird Island: the mongoose, brought in during the 1890s to kill rats in the cane fields, had eliminated the Antiguan racer from the main island entirely, and ship rats had reduced what survived out here to about fifty animals by 1995. Two decades of rat eradication and reintroduction across the offshore cays have taken the population past a thousand. Guides ask you to watch where you put your feet, and they mean it. Book the boat before the day rather than on it — most operators leave in the morning, in which case the estate, the bridge and the bay all move to the afternoon.
Ferry to Barbuda
The Barbuda Express leaves Heritage Quay in the morning and takes about an hour and a half across open water; it is a fast catamaran and the crossing is genuinely uncomfortable in a winter swell. It lands at River Dock on the south-west coast, beside the Martello tower the garrison built to watch the approach. Codrington, the only village, is fifteen minutes inland and holds essentially the entire population — around 1,600 before September 2017, fewer now. Spend the afternoon walking it. Hurricane Irma took the roofs off almost everything here on 6 September 2017 and the island was evacuated wholesale for the first time in three centuries; eight years on the rebuilding is visibly uneven, house by house, and everyone will tell you why. There is no public transport, so arrange a driver through your guesthouse on arrival rather than assuming one.
The lagoon, the caves and the sinkhole
A boat out of Codrington across the lagoon to the frigatebird colony in the mangroves — one of the largest breeding concentrations of magnificent frigatebirds anywhere, thousands of birds, the males inflating scarlet throat pouches through the display season from about September to April. The lagoon is a Ramsar site and you need a guide, which is the correct arrangement: the boats keep their distance and cut the engine. Irma cut a new channel clean through the sand spit that separates the lagoon from the sea, and the boatmen will show you where. In the afternoon cross to the windward side for the caves at Two Foot Bay, where there are Amerindian petroglyphs on the rock, and the ruins of Highlands House on the ridge above — the Codringtons' estate house, at 38 metres the highest ground on the island. Darby Sinkhole is inland from there: a collapsed limestone shaft about a hundred metres across with full-height palms growing out of the bottom of it.
Palmetto Point, then south
The last morning on the sand strip west of the lagoon — the beach that runs some twenty-seven kilometres (17 miles) down the outside of the spit, and the pink sand at Palmetto Point, which is pink because of crushed shell in it and is more obviously so in flat afternoon light than at noon. Do not go expecting an empty peninsula: the far end of it is the Barbuda Ocean Club, the golf course and residences that are the sharp end of the commons argument, and the sand in front of it is public — every beach in the country is, by law — which is not the same as feeling public. There is no shade, no water and nowhere to buy either, so carry both. The afternoon ferry is a ninety-minute crossing and puts you into St John's in the early evening. If you are flying out tomorrow, sleep near the airport at Runaway or Dickenson Bay rather than driving south again.
Good to know
Most European, British, North American and Commonwealth visitors enter Antigua and Barbuda without a visa; immigration asks for an onward ticket and an address, and the length of stay is stamped on arrival rather than fixed in advance, so say how long you actually want. The currency is the East Caribbean dollar, pegged at EC$2.70 to the US dollar since 1976 and shared with five other independent states and two British overseas territories — US dollars are accepted almost everywhere but at a shopkeeper's rate nearer 2.60, so you lose a few per cent every time you use them; draw EC$ from an ATM in St John's and note that cash machines on Barbuda cannot be relied on. Driving is on the left and you need a temporary local permit, about US$20, which the hire company issues against your own licence — roads are narrow and unlit, potholes are serious rather than cosmetic, and goats have right of way in practice. Water is the island's standing problem: Antigua has no rivers worth the name and is one of the driest islands in the Eastern Caribbean, so most of the public supply is desalinated seawater from reverse-osmosis plants, and the constraint is not quality but volume — districts are rationed on a rota in dry spells and nearly every property runs off a cistern. The mains supply is treated and chlorinated, but bottled or filtered water is what people drink, and on Barbuda you should assume you are carrying yours. Hurricane season runs 1 June to 30 November with the peak from mid-August to mid-October; Irma hit Barbuda on 6 September 2017 as a category five and destroyed or damaged something like ninety-five per cent of its buildings, and insurance, ferry schedules and hotel closures on both islands are all organised around those dates. Sargassum washes onto the Atlantic-facing east and south-east coasts in variable quantities from roughly spring into late summer; the leeward west coast is normally clear, and it is worth checking recent photographs rather than brochures if a specific beach is the point of your trip. The Barbuda Express does not sail every day and cancels for weather — confirm the schedule directly with the operator before you book accommodation on the far side, keep a spare day before an international flight, and know that the fallback is the fifteen-minute charter flight from V.C. Bird, which costs several times the ferry fare. Nelson's Dockyard sits inside a national park and one ticket, around US$8, covers the dockyard, Dow's Hill and Shirley Heights for the day; the Sunday and Thursday sessions at the Heights are charged separately at the gate. St John's is straightforward by day and the area around the quays is busy and fine; the town empties after the ships leave and the residential streets uphill from the centre are not somewhere to wander after dark — take a taxi back, which is normal behaviour here rather than caution. Barbuda has one village, one fuel station, patchy signal on the eastern side and no restaurant outside Codrington, so plan the day around that rather than around finding lunch.
Shorter or longer?
Two or three more days. There is no reliable ferry, but the flight from V.C. Bird to John A. Osborne Airport takes about twenty minutes, and on the other end are the buried remains of Plymouth, abandoned when the Soufrière Hills volcano began erupting in 1995, and the exclusion zone you can look into from Garibaldi Hill with the observatory's current boundary map in hand.
St John's, English Harbour, the interior and the east coast, and skip Barbuda entirely. A day trip north is three hours on a boat for four hours ashore, which is not enough to see the lagoon properly and not worth the crossing — either give Barbuda two nights or leave it for another trip.