Saint Barthélemy.

How does Saint Barthélemy compare in Caribbean?

Scored Caribbean destinations, Eco Index.

The global top 10 of the 77 destinations scored

What is Saint Barthélemy particularly good at?

✓ Conservation, scored 5/5. This is why St Barths is on the site at all, and it is genuinely exceptional. 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.

✓ Culture, scored 3/5. Be unromantic about the history. There is no surviving indigenous population on St Barths. 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 in 1659, when peace was concluded with the Caribs and de Poincy sent back about thirty men. What did survive is remarkable in its own way. St Barth Patois is a form of French that may preserve seventeenth century vernacular speech, spoken in the leeward Sous le Vent quarters of the island, among them Colombier. 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.

✓ Heritage, scored 3/5. Saint-Barthélemy has a distinctive but modest living heritage shaped by its unusual settlement by Norman, Breton and Poitevin fishing families and a brief Swedish period in Gustavia. Older residents still speak the local Saint-Barth patois, a French-based dialect, and the traditional craft of weaving latanier palm straw into hats and bags survives among a small number of artisans. Catholic patronal festivals, notably the Fête de Saint-Barthélemy on 24 August with its blessing of the boats, quadrille dancing and regattas, remain community touchstones. Much of the island's older folk culture has thinned under intense luxury tourism, so the heritage is genuine but partly commercialised.

Where does Saint Barthélemy score worst?

✕ Organic farming, scored 1/5. There is almost nothing to certify. The agricultural census recorded six farms on the entire island with a total utilised agricultural area of 1.3 hectares, which is 0.05 per cent of the territory, 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.

✕ Plant-based eating, scored 1/5. There is a market, but be clear what it is. 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.

✕ Water, scored 1/5. St Barths suffers a chronic water deficit from low rainfall and an absence of natural drinking water resources, in the words of the French central bank's overseas institute. 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 in August 2018 over bromates, disinfection switched from hypochlorite to chlorine dioxide, and the ban was lifted on 3 October 2019 once levels across the whole network fell below ten micrograms per litre.

Energy, 2/5

Saint-Barthélemy generates almost all of its electricity from an EDF power station running diesel engines, supplemented by a small but growing amount of rooftop solar and some wind, so the grid remains overwhelmingly fossil-based. As a wealthy, tourism-intensive island its energy demand per resident is high, driven by air-conditioning, desalination and imported goods, although no verified per-capita CO2 figure is published for the collectivity.

Food and farming, 1/5

The agricultural census recorded six farms on the entire island, with a total utilised agricultural area of 1.3 hectares, down from 25 hectares a decade earlier and more than 180 in 1980. That is 0.05 per cent of the territory.

Consequence: It is the lowest-scoring part of St Barths's record, so it is where the score moves first.

Heritage, 3/5

Saint-Barthélemy has a distinctive but modest living heritage shaped by its unusual settlement by Norman, Breton and Poitevin fishing families and a brief Swedish period in Gustavia. Older residents still speak the local Saint-Barth patois, a French-based dialect, and the traditional craft of weaving latanier palm straw into hats and bags survives among a small number of artisans.