This week’s dream: St Barts’ beautiful beaches

St Barts is "a little sliver of the Côte d'Azur in the Caribbean", says Jonathan Bastable in Condé Nast Traveller. Its people were once the poorest in the region, French families who came from Brittany and Normandy 300 years ago to eke out a living from fishing: the island has no topsoil so could never be planted. Then in 1945 the Dutch aviator and adventurer Rémy de Haenen built a house here and invited a string of famous friends to stay: Greta Garbo, Howard Hughes, Johnny Weissmuller, Robert Mitchum. With them came money and glamour and an "alluring air of hedonism" that has never left.

Today de Haenen's house, Eden Rock, is a hotel, a "big gaudy pageant of a place" favoured by "divas and rock stars". It stands on a rocky outcrop overlooking the beach of St Jean, a "great place to watch the world’s most beautiful people promenading back and forth in the world's priciest swimsuits". Those are available in the capital, Gustavia, a tiny village "packed to the gunnels" with top-flight jewellers and designer shops - Cartier, Dior, Hermès – "as if all of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré had been relocated to St Ives and drenched in tropical sunshine".

Although the island is only eight miles wide, it feels much larger, so "precipitous" is the terrain. And though uncultivable, it is "teeming with life": little white butter-flies dance among the trees, emerald geckos bask on its dusty byways, and pelicans dive for fish off its wild east coast. There's no lovelier way to spend a day than touring this coast, sampling a few of its 20 or so beaches in turn. At L'Orient you can watch turtles; Toiny is renowned among surfers for its barrelling Atlantic waves; and Grande Saline, "approached down a leafy corridor", is "the most flawless bow of coral sand imaginable".

Air France (0871 663 3777) flies from Heathrow to St Barts via St Martin. Double rooms at Eden Rock (+59 059 029 7999; ) from €414. ·