Caribbean island of St. Kitts sweet on tourism

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

Ever since Mother Nature morphed into Mommie Dearest last week, a Caribbean vacation sounds even better than usual.

Flashbacks to my January trip to St. Kitts and Nevis taunted me as I lumbered to work in the Chicago blizzard. Frozen tear ducts prevented me from weeping at the thought of that balmy night on the beach, when I wiggled my toes in the sand while feasting on fresh lobster and a cold bottle of Carib beer at the Shiggidy Shack.

With snow smacking my no longer sun-kissed face, I remembered the words of Wendy Lechner, who left her Northern U.S. home six years ago and hightailed it down to St. Kitts. She and her sister run Caribbean cooking classes for tourists.

“We just decided one day we wanted to be warm,” Lechner said.

Warm weather certainly is a carrot on the end of the Caribbean’s stick — and tourists are biting. The region is luring visitors in numbers not seen since the start of the Great Recession. The Caribbean Tourism Organization reported that 23.1 million foreigners visited the area last year. That’s nearly 5 percent more than in 2009.

Vacation hot spots like Jamaica and the Bahamas have been seducing sun-starved North Americans and Europeans for years. But tourism remains a relatively new industry for St. Kitts and its little sister Nevis.

Gaining independence from Britain in 1983, the twin-island federation — like other parts of the Caribbean — had long relied on sugar to drive its economy. When that sweet moneymaker turned sour thanks to increased global competition and other factors, many islands shifted their sights to tourism.

Stubborn St. Kitts hung on to sugar production longer than most, with the government taking control of the industry and eventually pulling the plug on it in 2005. That meant one of the world’s tiniest countries had to cultivate a new crop — one that wears sunscreen and drinks Dark and Stormies.

A new wave of development headed for this sleepy tropical backwater promises to deliver not only more tourists, but tourists with deeper pockets. Several upscale projects are in the pipeline. Among them, a Park Hyatt hotel slated for St. Kitts.

On the other side of the island, work recently began on the new Kittitian Hill resort, encompassing 110 hotel cottages, 69 villas, a golf course and a destination spa set on 400 hillside acres.

The most ambitious project by far is Christophe Harbour, a 2,500-acre luxury development under way on the isle’s southeast peninsula. Plans call for a five-star, 125-room hotel (most likely a Mandarin Oriental) that could break ground as early as the end of this year. A smaller boutique hotel also is part of the development, along with 1,400 “Real Housewives”-worthy homes and villas, which can be rented. Also on tap: a marina village with 300 yacht slips.

The project promises something that’s not easy to find on Caribbean islands: world-class golf. Work is nearing completion on a Tom Fazio-designed 18-hole course, featuring dramatic elevation changes and equally dramatic views of the Atlantic and Caribbean.

The emphasis on golf makes sense, given that the Christophe Harbour project is led by Kiawah Development Partners, the company behind other high-end golf destinations like South Carolina’s Kiawah Island and the Lodge at Doonbeg in Ireland. (Chicago-based Levy Family Partners is an investor in the St. Kitts project, too.)

Christophe Harbour — costing an estimated $500 million to build — will go a long way in giving St. Kitts some of the glitz currently lacking on this West Indies island, where the only major hotel is a Marriott.

The big resort chains historically haven’t paid much attention to St. Kitts; it’s a different story with the cruise lines. Over the last several years, the island has become an increasingly popular port of call — except during a brief period a few months ago. Masked gunmen robbed a group of Celebrity Cruises passengers taking a ship-sponsored tour of the island. Several men have since been arrested, and the scared off ships are back.

On most days you’ll see at least one big boat docked in Port Zante while passengers hike in the rain forest with vervet monkeys, take a ride on the Sugar Cane railway or buy tchotchkes in the capital city of Basseterre.

“St. Kitts is changing at a hell of a rate,” said Philip Walwyn, who’s lived here since 1968 — on land that’s been in his family since 1790. He remembers riding around the family’s sprawling sugar cane plantation on horseback.

“Seems like 300 years ago,” he said, grating fresh nutmeg on top of a glass of rum punch.

These days, Walwyn builds boats and his English-born wife, Kate Spencer, paints. They sell her colorful, island-inspired art in their welcoming hilltop home, where a view of St. Bart’s can be seen across the water on a clear day.

“Things had to change,” Walwyn said, referring to the country’s transition from sugar to tourism. “We had post-emancipation feudalism. Instead of being given food and clothing, [workers] were given just about enough money to buy food and clothing.

“The only tragedy is we have all this wonderful soil, and we need to start growing something instead of importing it all.”

That wonderful soil is still dotted with remnants of a bygone era, stone windmills and smokestacks that hark back to the island’s sugar cane days.

These picturesque relics set among towering palm trees and tropical hibiscus flowers undoubtedly will feature prominently in many a future tourist’s vacation photos — and memories. I’m sure the image will cross my mind at least once today during my cold walk home.

Information for this article was gathered on a research trip sponsored by Christophe Harbour and the Four Seasons Resort Nevis.