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If your picture of Antigua is a sunlounger, a wristband and a rum punch you didn’t have to pay for, you have seen one corner of it. The island takes about an afternoon to drive around, yet it fits in a Georgian naval dockyard, a sugar estate with a restored windmill, a rainforest road and an Atlantic coast that most resort guests never reach.
Thirty miles to the north sits Barbuda, flat and quiet, with one main village and the largest colony of magnificent frigatebirds in the world.
This itinerary gives you five days. Three go to Antigua’s less obvious sides, one to Barbuda, and the last to the island’s highest ground. It assumes you rent a car, because that is the easiest way to see Antigua on your own schedule.
Before You Go To Antigua and Barbuda
When To Visit
The dry season runs from roughly December to April, and that is when most visitors come. It is also when the island’s calendar fills up, with the charter yacht show in early December, the Classic Yacht Regatta in April and Sailing Week at the end of April or start of May.
Hurricane season lasts from June to November. Prices drop, and a few smaller hotels close for part of September and October.
If Barbuda’s birds are the draw, go between September and March. That is the breeding season, when the males sit in the mangroves with their scarlet throat pouches blown up like balloons.
Getting Around
- Cars drive on the left, and you need a temporary local driving permit. Most rental companies issue it when you collect the car.
- The currency is the Eastern Caribbean dollar, fixed at EC$2.70 to the US dollar, and US dollars are taken almost everywhere.
- Roads are narrow, potholed in places and patchily signposted, so download an offline map before you leave the airport.
Where To Stay
Base yourself in the south, around English Harbour and Falmouth Harbour. The guesthouses and small hotels there put you within walking distance of the dockyard and the Shirley Heights trail, and the east coast is a short drive away. The big resorts sit mostly on the west and north coasts, around Dickenson Bay and Jolly Harbour.
Try to start on a Saturday. The days then fall into place: the market on Saturday, the Shirley Heights party on Sunday, and Barbuda on Monday, since the ferry day tours don’t run on Sundays.
5-Day Antigua and Barbuda Itinerary
Day 1: St John’s and a West Coast Sunset
Start in St John’s, the capital, while the public market is at its busiest on Saturday morning. Look for the Antigua black pineapple, small and dark-skinned, which Antiguans will tell you is the sweetest pineapple anywhere. Pick up a bottle of Susie’s hot sauce in town as well, because you will want it later.
The Museum of Antigua and Barbuda is in the old courthouse on Long Street, one of the oldest buildings in town, and it covers the island’s story from its first Arawak settlers to independence in 1981. Walk up the hill to St John’s Cathedral and its twin white towers afterwards, then get clear of Heritage Quay before the cruise passengers come back from their tours.
In the afternoon, drive out to Fort James at the mouth of the harbour and then down the west coast. The beaches between Jolly Harbour and Darkwood all face west, so any of them works for sunset. For dinner, look for fungee and pepperpot, the national dish: a cornmeal paste a little like polenta, served with a thick stew of meat and greens.
Day 2: English Harbour and Nelson’s Dockyard
Nelson’s Dockyard is the reason to stay in the south. The British navy built it in the 18th century as a sheltered place to repair warships out of the path of hurricanes, and a young Horatio Nelson was posted here in the 1780s. The Georgian stone buildings now hold hotels, restaurants, a bakery and a small museum, and the whole complex was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2016.
UNESCO’s listing is clear that the dockyard was built by generations of enslaved Africans, so keep that in mind as you walk the waterfront past the Copper and Lumber Store and the stone pillars of the old boathouse.
In winter both harbours fill with sailing yachts and superyachts, and the ridges above them are dotted with villas. Some of the resort suites and villas around the island are sold to foreign buyers through Antigua and Barbuda’s citizenship programme, which accepts a stake in a government-approved development from US$300,000.
Late in the afternoon, walk to Galleon Beach and take the trail up through dry scrub to the old military lookout at Shirley Heights. The view back over English Harbour is the one on half the island’s postcards.
On Sunday evenings a steel band plays up there and there’s a barbecue. It gets busy, but it is one of the best parties on the island, and you can get a taxi back down if your legs have had enough.
Day 3: A Day Trip to Barbuda
Barbuda is low, dry and ringed with pale beaches, and fewer than 2,500 people live there, most of them in the village of Codrington. The Barbuda Express ferry takes about 90 minutes from St John’s, and its day tours bundle the crossing with a driver, lunch and a boat trip into the lagoon. The channel can be rough, so take something for seasickness if you need it, or fly across instead.
The main event is the Frigate Bird Sanctuary in Codrington Lagoon. Small boats take you across the lagoon to the mangroves where the birds nest, close enough to watch the chicks and the males with their pouches up. Guides keep the boats behind a line and the visits short so the colony isn’t disturbed, which means about fifteen minutes among thousands of birds.
After the birds, most tours stop at one of the long beaches where crushed shell turns the sand pink, and at the caves on the island’s higher eastern side. Bring cash, don’t expect many restaurants, and order lobster if it’s on offer, because fishing for it is one of the island’s main trades.
Barbuda has had a hard decade. Hurricane Irma destroyed more than 90 percent of its buildings in September 2017, and the entire population was evacuated to Antigua. Most people were home by early 2019, and rebuilding goes on. Spending your money with local drivers, guides and cooks is one of the more useful things a visitor can do here.
Day 4: The East Coast
Antigua’s Atlantic side is windier and far quieter than the west. Start at Betty’s Hope, a sugar plantation founded in the 1650s and owned for most of its history by the Codrington family, who also held Barbuda from the Crown. One of its stone windmills has been restored with its sails. The estate ran on the labour of enslaved Africans until emancipation in 1834, and the stone ruins spread around the mills make that history hard to ignore.
From there, drive east to Devil’s Bridge, a natural limestone arch near the tip of the island. When the swell is up, the Atlantic shoots through blowholes in the rock around it, so stay well back from the edge. The rock is sharp and the waves come in hard.
Spend the afternoon at Half Moon Bay, a wide crescent of pale sand in the southeast that sits inside a national park and rarely feels crowded. The sea here can be rougher than on the west coast, so check conditions before you swim.
If you’d rather be on the water, boats go out from the northeast coast to the offshore islands. Great Bird Island is one of the few places where the Antiguan racer, one of the rarest snakes in the world, still lives in the wild, and the reefs around the islands are good for snorkelling.
Day 5: Fig Tree Drive and Boggy Peak
Keep the last day for the southwest. Fig Tree Drive winds through the greenest part of the island, past banana plants (Antiguans call bananas “figs”, which is where the road gets its name), mango trees and roadside stalls selling fruit and coconut water. Take it slowly. The road is narrow and the stalls are the point.
Boggy Peak, the highest point on Antigua at 402 metres, rises above the drive in the Shekerley Mountains. It was renamed Mount Obama in 2009 and the old name has drifted back into use, so you will hear both. Ask locally about hiking up; the view from the top takes in most of the island.
Finish on one of the southwest beaches, Darkwood, Ffryes or Turner’s. On a clear evening you can see the outline of Montserrat to the southwest while the sun goes down.
Final Words
Five days covers both islands without rushing and leaves room for a lazy morning. If you only have three, drop Day 5 and keep Barbuda, because nothing else in the Caribbean looks like that lagoon full of frigatebirds.
The one decision this plan leaves to you is whether Barbuda deserves a night instead of a day. The day tour is easy, but the island empties out once the ferry leaves, and nobody on the boat back gets to see that.
