St Croix's Danish colonial town — pastel arcades on the waterfront, Buck Island reef, and Alexander Hamilton's boyhood island
Christiansted is the main town on St Croix — the largest of the US Virgin Islands — and one of the finest examples of Danish colonial architecture in the Americas. The waterfront is lined with arched pastel arcades, sugar warehouses, and yellow-painted fort walls from the 18th century. Buck Island Reef National Monument offshore is considered one of the best snorkelling sites in the Caribbean. St Croix was where Alexander Hamilton spent his formative years as a young clerk before leaving for New York.
St Croix was colonised by the Danish West India Company in 1733, purchased from France, and developed into a prosperous sugar island worked by enslaved Africans — the Danish Virgin Islands had one of the highest plantation densities in the Caribbean. Christiansted became the capital of all Danish possessions in the West Indies. The United States purchased the Danish Virgin Islands in 1917 for strategic reasons (protecting the Panama Canal approaches), paying $25 million in gold — at the time the largest US land purchase since Alaska. The island's cane fields are long gone, but the 18th-centur…