DESTINATIONS SAINT LUCIA | CARIBBEAN


High and mighty


Saint Lucia’s luxury product is reaching new heights, finds Erica Bush


m travelweekly.co.uk


ajesty Reigns bobs lazily in the water as I gaze out over Saint Lucia’s national landmark. The


Pitons stand tall against a baby-blue sky hung with white, woolly clouds – the largest, Gros Piton, rounded and tree-cloaked; the other, Petit Piton, jagged and spiked like a chunk of Toblerone, its crest circled by frigatebirds. There are many ways to see the island’s treasured


Unesco World Heritage Site. The only way to see it from this perspective, though – its two spires standing side by side in a sort of power stance – is from the water, which is how I find myself sipping rum punch on a sleek catamaran with a suitably regal name.


BUTLER SERVICE Such excursions are organised by one’s butler when staying at Serenity at Coconut Bay. The hotel, three minutes from Hewanorra airport along the southeast coast in Vieux Fort, is one of the newest additions to the island’s luxury product, having opened two years


ago as the high-end, adult-only arm to 250-room Coconut Bay. Everything about the property exudes luxury. From


large, enclosed courtyards furnished with private plunge pools and hammocks shaded by swaying palms to four-poster mahogany beds, stone-clad rainfall showers and the scent of fresh mint in the air, each of Serenity’s 36 suites feels both exclusive and indulgent. Hummingbirds and butterflies flit through immaculately kept tropical gardens; the hotel’s main pool is a haven of tranquillity, with sunken waterbeds, six cosy cabanas and a bar; and the Greathouse restaurant provides farm-to-table, Creole-fusion cuisine sourced largely from two on-site greenhouses. But it’s Serenity’s butler service that places this hotel among the island’s best. Butlers – just a phone call away – can run bubble baths infused with sweet- scented petals, organise in-suite spa treatments, lay on romantic poolside dinners in candlelit cabanas and ferry clients to their own private hideaway on the beach complete with picnic and prosecco.²


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PICTURE: Shutterstock


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