Head to Barbados - beyond those beaches

Bajan reinvention: The Atlantis is a 100-year-old inn turned boutique guesthouse and restaurant

10 April 2012

This place is a building site. I'm tiptoeing like a tightrope walker along a plank into what will be the reception of the Atlantis Hotel — the hottest opening on Barbados this season.

"People used to come here for ABC — All Bajan Cuisine. The place was famous for its Sunday lunches but it fell into disrepair around diners' ears," says my hard-hat guide Graham Dear, one of the team that has taken on this seaside inn, now more than 100 years old, and turned it into a boutique guesthouse and restaurant for the 21st century.

I visited last summer, when Dear and his team were hard at work creating a hotel of the same calibre as their other property, Little Good Harbour, in Shermans, at the top of the west coast, a small complex of quality apartments attached to one of the island's best restaurants, The Fish Pot.

The Atlantis, which finally opened in December, has eight rooms and two two-bedroom apartments, with guests sharing an outdoor pool.

That pool is essential. The Atlantis sits on the sands just outside Bathsheba on the east coast, which is pummelled by the petulant Atlantic Ocean.

But the forces of nature have been conversely kind to the east coast, saving it from overdevelopment and keeping it the treasured secret of Bajans and those visitors who bother to venture this far from the beaches of the south and west of the island.

Further south along these eastern shores, at Whitehaven, a piece of land is being earmarked for a new resort by the Canadian hotelier Paul Doyle.

He is best known in Barbados for transforming The Crane on the south-east coast, which was built as a small, exclusive hotel in 1887 for passengers on the railway line which had just opened in these parts but sadly runs no more.

Doyle has expanded The Crane to include 220 luxurious rooms and suites designed with a light colonial touch, and a village of restaurants, bars, boutiques and galleries. His new resort will be architecturally contemporary, each ocean-facing room supplied with its own infinity pool.

The landscape is changing, too, at Apes Hill, just inland from the ritzy west coast. The former hilltop plantation is being developed into a new estate of 400 luxury residences called Apes Hill Club, set around meadows, forests and coral-stone quarries, and interweaved by an 18-hole championship golf course, which officially opened in December.

There's a polo pitch, too, for those who fancy the odd chukka.

Apes Hill Club residences, which cost from US$500,000 to $10 million-plus, are being snapped up like there's no credit crunch — and apparently, largely by the British — but won't be completed until next year.

The Almond Casuarina Beach Resort offers more reasonably priced lodgings. The all-inclusive hotel, at the quiet end of the party strip of St Lawrence Gap on the south coast, has just undergone a major refurbishment.

The beachfront has been reorganised, with the construction of a huge block of 95 sea-facing rooms with balconies, and a vast pool divided into adults' and kids' areas by a swim-up bar.

The fine-dining Dover restaurant, serving a seafood menu, has been repositioned on the sands, a few strides from the wedding arch, for maximum romance potential.

Marketfive by John Hazzard, one of the latest restaurants to open its doors on the island, may not have as inspiring a setting — the new Satjay Bridgetown Centre shopping mall in the capital is its home. But the culinary creations coming out of this kitchen are a taste of things to come from a new generation of home-grown chefs.

Hazzard conjures imaginative fare with local ingredients. The restaurant wouldn't look out of place in London or New York.

For active thrills, The Barbados Zipline Adventure offers an invigorating way to see the tropical vegetation of 100 foot-deep Jack-in-the-Box Gully at Walkes Spring Plantation in the centre of the island. Or go underground to explore the geological phenomenon of Harrison's Cave, a limestone cavern that was first unearthed in 1795 but only really explored in the Seventies when it was rediscovered.

The cave reopened late last month with improved facilities. Now visitors can descend from the clifftop approach to the cave's entrance on the valley floor via two scenic trails or in a glass-fronted lift.

A guided tour by tram is the only way to explore the underground chambers themselves but the commentary is an entertaining way to appreciate the weird and wonderful stalactites and stalagmites formed from the calcium-rich waters that still cascade through the cave.

Don't forget to pack a jumper — this is one place on the island where you won't need your sun block.

DETAILS:

THE FLIGHT
Virgin Atlantic flies from Gatwick to Barbados. Returns from £571.60. www.virginatlantic.com

THE PACKAGE
Thomas Cook Signature has seven nights at the four-star Tamarind Cove from £1,299pp B&B, flights and transfers, www.tcsignature.com

THE HOTELS
The Atlantis Hotel has doubles from £198 B&B. www.atlantishhotel

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