Seniors Enjoy West Indies Island

Saint Kitts, also known more formally as Saint Christopher Island, is an island in the West Indies. On the west side of the island, senior visitors will see the Caribbean Sea, and on the eastern coast, the Atlantic Ocean.

Its a combination of natural beauty, sunny skies, warm waters, and white sandy beaches that combine to make St. Kitts (pop. 45,000) one of the most seductive islands in the Caribbean.

Christopher Columbus first spotted St. Kitts in 1493 when it was populated with native tribes. The Europeans didn’t colonize until later when the British arrived in 1623. Its strategic location and valuable sugar trade led to an advanced and luxurious development that was among the best in the Colonial Caribbean.

Now just imagine an island that has set aside more than a quarter of its land as a National Park, with a rainforest that is actually expanding in size rather than shrinking. That’s St. Kitts.

The island is surrounded by new and untouched dive sites, marked by massive beds of coral, teeming with fish of every stripe and color.

Senior visitors are impressed with the abundant wildlife that includes vervet monkeys, mongoose and roaming cows, goats, and sheep that have black bellies.

Seniors Find Sugar, Tourism and White Sand Beaches

Frommer’s notes that “St. Kitts’s major crop is sugar, a tradition dating from the 17th century. But tourism may overwhelm it in the years to come, as its southeastern peninsula, site of the best white-sand beaches, has been set aside for massive resort development.”

As senior visitors will discover, most of the island’s other beaches are of black or gray volcanic sand. Fodor’s chimes in with… “Mountainous St. Kitts, the first English settlement in the Leeward Islands, offers a surprisingly diverse vacation experience.

Divers have yet to discover all its underwater attractions and history buffs will marvel at Brimstone Hill, known in the 18th century as the Gibraltar of the West Indies.”

The many beaches offers pristine aqua waters, soft sand, coconut trees and an uninterrupted peace that keeps folks coming back t0 the two islands again and again. Me, I’d head for the Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park, a World Heritage Site, and the largest fortress ever built in the Eastern Caribbean.

Senior Travelers Find A Vacation Paradise

So where is St. Kitts? The island is one of what are called the Leeward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. about 1,300 miles southeast of Miami. Saint Kitts and the next door island of Nevis (just 2 miles apart) make up one country. The Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis… senior travelers will find both a vacation paradise.

Lonely Planet notes that the two islands “provide a near-perfect package.” Gotta be something special there as US News reports that Oprah Winfrey, Britney Spears, Sylvester Stallone and Regis Philbin  have found solace on the Kittitian-Nevisian sands.

Both of these intoxicating islands are on my travel bucket list. -jeb