Beaches in U.S. Virgin Islands

Three main islands and some fifty smaller ones, bought from Denmark by the United States in 1917 and an unincorporated territory since — which is why the roads carry American traffic law and yet keep left, a combination that exists almost nowhere else. The three are unalike. Saint Thomas holds the airport, the cruise berths and the shopping, with Magens Bay on its northern shore. Saint Croix, the largest and flattest, was sugar country and keeps the Danish town plans at Christiansted and Frederiksted along with the only submarine canyon in the group. Saint John is the reason the territory appears in this register at all: about two-thirds of it is national park, given by Laurance Rockefeller in 1956, and the beaches along its northern shore are undeveloped in a way almost nothing else in the eastern Caribbean is. Hurricanes Irma and Maria both crossed the territory within two weeks in 2017 and the damage was severe. Practically: beaches are public to the high-water mark, the dry season runs December to April, hurricane season June to November, and Saint John is reached by ferry from Saint Thomas because it has no airport of its own.