'Favoured few' raise local ire

The Sunday Times, 10 September 2000

Guests at one of the Caribbean’s most exclusive hotels have become embroiled in a dispute with islanders over access to the beach. A group of local protestors blocked roads into the Italian-owned Carenage Bay Beach and Golf Club after they were banned from using their cars to reach the beach.

The multimillion-pound resort, which charges up to £675 per room per night, opened earlier this year on the tiny island of Canouan in the Grenadines and has already attracted a string of celebrity guests, including Bill Gates. Under a lease agreement with the government, it occupies more than 75% of the four-square-mile island.

Trouble in paradise flared when the hotel banned cars within its grounds, effectively preventing locals from visiting the beach. The hotel says the ban was a safety measure to protect guests, who use golf carts to move around the resort.

In its brochure, the Carenage Bay boasts that it offers “a private, exclusive world surrounded by the splendid sea of the southern Antilles” and “a place for the favoured few”. Its buildings are designed to blend unobtrusively into their surroundings and the hotel has a health spa offering natural remedies plucked from the Amazon rainforest.

About 20 locals manned the blockade, closing the road into the resort. The prime minister, Alan Eustace, agreed to intervene to break the standoff.

The hotel owner, Antonio Saladino, said: “I am sorry this dispute happened, as it was never out intention to be in contention with local residents.

The resort has opened up employment and we make many local purchases. We restricted vehicular access to the beach purely on safety grounds.”

The Carenage Bay, which employs up to 400 of the 1,000 islanders, claims it never restricted access to the beach by foot and says all its employees reported for work during the blockade.

The dispute ended with a compromise: the hotel has agreed within the next six months to build a new road to the beach with parking facilities for locals.