Spice Island Beach Resort Review: Sixty-Four Years of Getting It Right

The Spice Island Beach Resort has been on Grand Anse Beach since 1961 — the year that Victor Bhatt opened the original property on Grenada’s finest beach with the specific conviction that the island’s combination of the nutmeg, the Damask rose, the sea and the specific warmth of the Grenadian people constituted a resort proposition of genuine distinction rather than merely a beach in the Caribbean. The conviction was correct. The property is now in its third generation of family management. The sixty-four suites are on the same beach. The nutmeg oil is still in the spa treatments. The conviction that specificity is more valuable than scale has been maintained through the competitive pressures that have caused comparable properties to expand beyond the point at which the quality can be sustained, and the result is a boutique all-inclusive of such accumulated refinement that the Eastern Caribbean’s luxury all-inclusive market measures itself against this property rather than against the Dominican Republic’s volume or Mexico’s comprehensive infrastructure.

Grand Anse Beach — the two-kilometre arc of white sand on Grenada’s southwestern coast that the tourism industry has been calling one of the finest beaches in the Caribbean since the island appeared on the international travel map — provides the physical foundation. The specific fineness of the sand, the calm of the bay’s protected water, and the specific light of the Windward Islands’ latitude at sixteen degrees north, where the sun’s angle produces the Caribbean’s most saturated turquoise in the early afternoon above the white sand bottom, constitute a beach that requires no qualification in the description. It is genuinely very beautiful. The resort on it is genuinely very good. The combination is the Eastern Caribbean’s most complete boutique all-inclusive experience.

The Suites

Sixty-four suites in the categories that a property of this intimacy and this standing maintains as specific named rooms rather than standardised categories: the Pool Suites with their private pools in the beachfront garden, the Whirlpool Suites with the ocean-facing whirlpool on the terrace, the Royal and Luxury Beach Suites on the beach itself with the Caribbean directly accessible from the private terrace without the hotel path that separates most suites from the sea. The rooms are large without the grandeur that larger all-inclusives deploy as a statement of luxury at scale. The statement here is refinement rather than grandeur, and the refinement is present in the specific quality of the linens, the specific selection of the amenities, and the specific knowledge that the housekeeping staff demonstrate by the second day about the guest’s preferences — the temperature of the room, the turndown timing, the specific arrangement of the terrace furniture — that accumulates into the feeling of being in a place that has paid attention.

The Spa

The Janissa’s Spa programme draws from the island’s spice tradition — the nutmeg oil, the mace, the cinnamon, the bay leaf — in treatments that use the ingredients growing within five kilometres of the spa in the specific applications that the Grenadian women’s traditional knowledge of their own agricultural produce has developed over the generations since the nutmeg economy established itself in the nineteenth century. The nutmeg oil body wrap is the treatment that most guests cite as the specific experience of the Spice Island Spa that no other Caribbean spa replicates with the same authenticity, because no other Caribbean island grows nutmeg in the quantity and the quality that Grenada produces and no other Caribbean spa has the sixty-year relationship with the island’s spice tradition that the Spice Island Beach Resort’s family management has accumulated. The spa is not importing a tradition. It is expressing one.

The SS Bianca C

The SS Bianca C is five hundred and ninety-three feet of Italian ocean liner on the seabed outside St George’s Harbour — the largest wreck in the Caribbean, sinking in 1961 (the same year the resort opened) after a fire in the harbour, resting at sixty metres with enough structural integrity remaining to be recognisable as a ship at depth and enough years of coral colonisation to have become its own reef ecosystem. The dive to the Bianca C requires advanced open-water certification and the specific physical preparation that a sixty-metre dive demands — the narcosis at depth, the decompression stops on the ascent, and the time limits that the depth imposes on the bottom time. For the advanced diver whose Caribbean trip includes the Bianca C specifically, the Spice Island Beach Resort’s proximity to the St George’s dive operators provides the most convenient base on the island for the descent.

The Food

The Oliver’s restaurant serves the Caribbean tradition through the Grenadian kitchen’s specific regional strengths: the flying fish in the preparation that the Windward Islands’ fishing tradition uses, the callaloo soup whose dasheen leaf base is the Caribbean’s most specifically West Indian first course, and the lambi (conch) chowder that Grenadian beach cooking has been making since before the resort existed and that the Oliver’s kitchen makes at the standard that sixty years of family ownership requires. The wine list is genuinely competitive for a Caribbean all-inclusive — the family’s investment in the cellar reflects the understanding that the guest whose evening begins with flying fish deserves a wine that matches the preparation’s quality rather than the house pour that the category’s economics usually justify.

Practical Details

64 suites. All-inclusive. Adults-only (12+). Rates from approximately $500-$700 per night. Maurice Bishop International Airport approximately 10 minutes by road. The family management is present — the third generation’s involvement in the day-to-day operations is visible in the specific quality of attention that properties run by owners rather than managers produce.