Antigua & Barbuda · AG

Guiana Island

Guiana Island is a low, uninhabited isle of roughly 600 acres lying off Antigua's northeast coast, tucked between the Parham Peninsula and Crump Island and forming the sheltered southern wall of the North Sound. The fourth-largest island in Antigua and Barbuda, it has no permanent residents and no resorts—just bush-covered hills, a ring of mangroves and reefs, the bones of an 18th-century sugar plantation, and a flock of birds and a herd of deer that have claimed it as their own. It is the kind of place you come to look at rather than to lounge on: a quiet, untouched Caribbean sanctuary seen best from the water. What makes Guiana Island special is the way history and nature sit side by side. A derelict stone estate house and the ruins of lime kilns recall two centuries of cane, cotton and cattle, while the island's coral-fringed shores and mangrove cays make it a refuge for the fallow deer that is Antigua's national animal and for the endangered West Indian whistling-duck. For most visitors the experience is a slow boat cruise along the coast on a North Sound eco tour, watching seabirds wheel over the mangroves and reading the silhouettes of the old plantation against the sea.