There are no springs and no useful groundwater.

So it is manufactured. Drinking water is produced under concession by SIDEM, using one vaporisation unit and three reverse osmosis units, stored in 2,500 cubic metres of reservoirs at Colombier and Vitet, and distributed by SAUR across a 463 km network to around 4,900 customers. A new reverse osmosis unit inaugurated in February 2025 produces between 3,000 and 4,700 cubic metres a day, close to doubling capacity.

The supply has not always been clean. Consumption was banned at the end of 2018 over bromates, after which disinfection switched from calcium hypochlorite to chlorine dioxide, with no non compliance detected since.

That is 0.05 per cent of the territory. Two thirds of those holdings are flowers and horticulture rather than food, and the primary sector is 0.1 per cent of salaried employment.

Everything else arrives by sea, and there is no direct European service, so goods transit Guadeloupe or Sint Maarten. In 2024, 26 tonnes of food were the subject of destruction requests after delivery delays, and in the first quarter of 2025 there were 33 days of full or partial dockers' strikes in France.

A vertical hydroponic farm, Zero St Barth, was proposed at Saint-Jean to grow 10 to 15 tonnes a year. The building permit was refused in July 2022, on the grounds of insufficient electricity and drinking water networks, and the absence of a four sided pitched roof.

Fishing is the main local production, at around 41 tonnes exported in 2023 from about 40 registered fishers.

Le Marché de St-Barth runs on the first Sunday of each month, from 8am to noon on rue du Général de Gaulle in Gustavia, with around 40 to 45 stands, and it began in 2018 with 15 traders.

With 1.3 hectares of farmland on the island, there is no meaningful volume of local produce to sell there. An association of growers formed in 2022 with the stated aim of relocalising agriculture and food, and its priority list is land and the price of water, which tells you the size of the problem.

We are scoring this a one and we would rather say so than dress a monthly craft and food market up as a farmers market.

ritory, and two thirds of those holdings are flowers and horticulture rather than food.

An association of growers formed in 2022 with the stated aim of relocalising agriculture and food, and its priority list is land and the price of water, which tells you the size of the problem. A proposed vertical hydroponic farm had its permit refused in July 2022 partly on the grounds of insufficient drinking water supply.

We score this a one and we would rather say so than dress up a monthly market as an organic food scene.

The Réserve Naturelle Nationale was created by decree on 10 October 1996, the 132nd national nature reserve of France. It covers 1,200 hectares across five marine sectors around Gros Îlets and Pain de Sucre, Île Fourchue, Frégate, Île Toc Vers and part of Colombier bay. It holds 183 fish species, 51 coral species among the richest in the French Antilles, 60 sponges, 200 molluscs, five seagrasses and 14 nesting seabird species.

The rules are unusually strict and worth knowing before you get in the water. In the reinforced protection zone, fishing, anchoring and scuba diving are all totally prohibited. Elsewhere, ecological mooring buoys take a maximum 20 tonnes for a maximum 96 hours, after which a vessel must leave and may not return for 96 hours. Speed is capped at five knots and jet skis, seabobs and electric surfboards are banned outright. Collecting coral, plants and shells is prohibited, as is touching protected marine species and feeding animals. So are gloves, explicitly, so that nobody can pick anything up.

It is enforced. The Agence Territoriale de l'Environnement, created in 2013, holds environmental policing powers and recorded 66 fishing offences in 2022 alongside 1,884 awareness actions. The island adopted its own environmental code in 2009, cancelling the French national code on its territory, and recast it from January 2022 to add protected species including seahorses and oceanic whitetip and lemon sharks, and to ban access to certain islets for threatened birds. Seventy per cent of the territory is classed as green zone.

It was designated a Mission Blue Hope Spot on 5 May 2022. And goats were removed from Île Fourchue between 2003 and 2004: in the fourteen years that followed, the number of plant species recorded there rose by 80 per cent.

The environment agency states the island holds species found nowhere else or nearly nowhere else, but does not name them publicly, and the anole most often cited, Anolis gingivinus, is endemic to the Anguilla Bank as a whole rather than to St Barths. Call it an Anguilla Bank endemic, never a St Barths endemic.

What is verified is the assemblage: 51 coral species, 14 nesting seabird species, green and hawksbill turtles frequent with occasional leatherback nesting, humpback whales and bottlenose dolphins. The island inventory stands at 1,702 animal species and 492 indigenous plants.

Sea turtle work is volunteer led, with around twenty volunteers a year walking the island's roughly ten beaches under the environment agency, as part of the French Antilles turtle restoration plan. Invasive pressure comes from striped iguanas, corn snakes, feral goats and feral cats.

It is bound up with the island's headdresses: the quichenotte brought by settlers' wives, replaced by the calèche created in 1769, which now appears mainly at patronal festivals. In Corossol and Colombier the boned calèche was replaced by a straw hat woven from latanier leaves, with panama weaving techniques taught on the island from around 1925.

Corossol is a working fishing village where women have woven latanier and where the calèche à platine is still worn at festivals, so buying a woven hat there pays the maker. But we found no cooperative, no prices and no count of practising weavers, and the one regional article whose title addresses the question calls it the end of a tradition. We are not going to present this as a thriving craft economy.

The monthly market in Gustavia, with its 40 to 45 stands, is the clearest direct to maker channel on the island.

St Barths has been an EU Overseas Country and Territory since 1 January 2012, outside the EU customs territory, and it cancelled the application of the French national environmental code on its territory in 2009 in favour of its own. So neither the EU Single Use Plastics Directive nor the French loi AGEC applies here automatically.

Whether the island itself now bans single use plastic is unconfirmed. Local media reported in December 2018 that an article then in preparation would ban all single use plastic objects except water bottles, and we could find nothing confirming it was adopted. A counter indication: plastics on St Barths are not sorted, they go straight to incineration.

The waste picture is genuinely mixed. Volumes are high, at 684 kg of household waste per inhabitant, with residual household waste at double the French national average, which is what luxury tourism does. But St Barths has the lowest landfill rate of any French overseas territory, at 25 per cent, against 78 per cent in Guadeloupe, with about half of treatment by incineration and around a quarter material recovery. Sorted residues are shipped to Guadeloupe, the United States and Europe.

The quiet scandal is wastewater. An environment agency study found close to 99 per cent of houses have private sanitation that does not meet current standards, with failures draining to the sea, and the seagrass bed in Marigot bay is described as largely degraded as a result.

Volumes are high: 684 kg of household waste per inhabitant, with residual household waste at double the French national average, which is what luxury tourism does to a small island.

But St Barths has the lowest landfill rate of any French overseas territory, at 25 per cent in 2020 against 78 per cent in Guadeloupe, with about half of treatment by incineration and around a quarter material recovery. It is the only French overseas collectivity still incinerating, and the incinerator is coupled to drinking water production. Sorted residues, scrap metal, glass, bottom ash, pallets, tyres and batteries, are shipped to Guadeloupe, the United States and Europe.

The blot is plastic: on St Barths plastics are not sorted at all, they go straight to incineration.

Arawak and Carib people visited and used the island, which they called Ouanalao, but the accounts describe sporadic use rather than continuous settlement, attributed to the absence of fresh water. French colonisation began in 1648, the first European inhabitants were killed by Carib raiders in 1656, and settlement resumed from 1660.

What did survive is remarkable in its own way. St Barth Patois is regarded as the oldest dialect of French still spoken in the West Indies, concentrated in the leeward quarters of Flamands, Colombier, Corossol, Public and Anse de Cayes, with speakers estimated at between 500 and 700 in 1997. It is distinct from St Barth Creole, spoken on the windward side where there was a higher concentration of enslaved Africans and their descendants. A linguist found four varieties on eight square miles, one of which is probably already gone.

The Wall House museum in Gustavia has occupied an 18th century building of the Swedish period since 1995 and is free to enter, which also means it is not an income channel to the community. Corossol and the monthly market are.