Anguilla keeps its best beach on the west end, at the far edge of Maundays Bay. Cap Juluca has held that stretch of sand since the 1980s, and it still gives up nothing to the road behind it.
The domes come first. White, rounded, Moorish, they sit low against the sand and catch the light before you reach them. The forms went up in the 1980s and Belmond kept their line through the renovations. From the water the villas read as one pale run, curved to follow the crescent of the bay.
Maundays Bay stretches about a mile, west-facing and calm. The sea shades from clear to a hard turquoise by late morning. Anguilla counts more than thirty beaches, and people here will argue for several, but this is the one the island tends to name first.
Maundays Bay, Cap Juluca, A Belmond Hotel, Anguilla
The rooms
Villas line the beach, most a few steps from the water. Suites run large, many with private pools, some with the sand at the door. The interiors stay pale and cool against the heat outside: stone floors, white walls, shutters that open onto the bay. The biggest villas take five bedrooms and suit a family that wants the beach to itself.
The tables
Pimms is the flagship, set over the water at the point of the bay. The kitchen cooks Anguillian, leans on the day's catch, and keeps a wine list that means it. Dinner runs small, groups capped and children welcome only from twelve, which tells you the kind of evening it wants to be.
Cip's by Cipriani carries the name of Belmond's Venice restaurant to the Caribbean. Carpaccio, pasta, antipasti, served al fresco on a terrace above Maundays Bay. Uchu turns Peruvian by the pool once the sun drops, with a ceviche bar to start. The Cap Shack keeps its feet in the sand: pigeon peas and rice, johnny cakes, grilled lobster, a rum punch in hand.
The domes were built for this beach, and forty years on they still belong to it.
The Splendid EditOff the sand
The spa runs under Guerlain, set back from the beach in its own quiet. Days move between the water and the shade. There is sailing off the point, tennis, a garden that feeds the kitchens, and a new oceanfront pavilion that holds weddings and long tables at the edge of the sea.
The Jamaican photographer Jeano Edwards shot the place recently and called its light a silvery sweetness. That reads as accurate on the ground. The bay turns metallic at dusk, the domes go rose, and the sky over the west end does most of the work.
Cap Juluca runs a seasonal calendar. It closes for a stretch through the heat of late summer and into the autumn, then opens again in October. For now the season is running down, and the bay is about as quiet as it gets before the doors shut.
The verdict
Belmond has grander hotels and older ones. Cap Juluca is neither. It is a mile of west-facing sand, a line of white domes, and four tables worth sitting at, on an island that stays off most itineraries. That is the pitch, and it holds.
Take a villa on the water. Eat at Pimms once, at the Cap Shack often. Give the rest to the beach.
The Splendid Edit on Cap Juluca, A Belmond Hotel, Maundays Bay, Anguilla. The resort runs a seasonal calendar; villas and suites book through belmond.com.
Photography courtesy of Belmond — © Belmond, Cap Juluca, Anguilla