Roatan: The Island Jewel of the Western Cariibbean

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The Island Jewel of the Western Caribbean

www.RoatanTravelGuide.com

The Bay Islands in the Western Caribbean

offer some of the most unspoiled amenities of the Caribbean. One of these islands is Roatan, where tropical forests, cloudless skies, pristine beaches and an azure ocean that is home to an amazing coral reef all combine to envelop one in a world that many would describe as paradise.

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The Island Jewel of the Western Caribbean

The Resort Villas at Pristine Bay

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he first eleven 2 bed/2 bath air-conditioned luxury villas, each with unobstructed views of the beach and ocean, offer three different floor plans from 2,500 to 3,100 square feet (including covered deck and outside deck area).

The fully-furnished Resort Villas at Pristine Bay are inspired by Caribbean architecture with high, white-washed ceilings; stained wood trusses and trim; Italian terracotta tile roofs; wood shutters; and white plaster walls. Other features include spacious bathrooms with the finest fixtures, large great rooms, full-service kitchens, dining and living areas with French doors opening to expansive terraces, infinity edge pools, and more.

Owners acquire a free-standing villa fee simple (whole ownership) and enjoy full access to all resort amenities. They receive 65 days of annual usage while owning the land and building as the villa accumulates hotel villa revenue (evenly pooled and allocated based on owner usage) when they are not visiting the Resort. Prices range from $825,000 to $895,000 including their own infinity edge pools facing the ocean.

Amenities The Resort Villas at Pristine Bay will feature 60 rooms and suites, a full-service spa, restaurants, bars, 2 large infinity edge pools, 1,000 ft. private white sand beach, a tennis club, and The Black Pearl Golf Course, designed by Pete and Perry Dye. It boasts incredible ocean views on 14 holes and a signature island-green, par-3 11th hole. A 75-slip, full-service marina near The Black Pearl Clubhouse will provide deep-water access for a wide variety of vessels. The five-star Resort and Spa at Pristine Bay is scheduled to open in late spring of 2012 and will be managed by Destination Resorts, Ltd., which also manages Victoria House Resort on Ambergris Caye, Belize.

Pristine Bay Located on the lush, tropical island of Roatan, 35 miles off the northern coast of Honduras, Pristine Bay is on a 400-plus acre site adjacent to the Caribbean Sea. The azure waters feature the world’s second largest barrier reef off the island coast, famous for world-class fishing and scuba diving, providing one of the truly unique, stunning backdrops for golf in Central America and the western Caribbean.

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Pan Caribbean Capital Partners I, Ltd. / Destination Resorts, Ltd. Pan Caribbean Capital Partners I, Ltd. is a privately held Houston investment partnership. Destination Resorts, Ltd. is headed by J. William Sharman, Jr. who is also the Chairman & CEO of The Lancaster Group, Inc., a hotel development and management firm with corporate offices in Houston, Texas. Mr. Sharman was also a founder of Small Luxury Hotels of the World, an international consortium of over 500 properties in 70 countries.

Lancaster properties have included the Lancaster Hotel in Houston, Texas; the Jefferson Hotel in Washington, D.C.; the Cotton House on Mustique Island in the Grenadines; the Argyle (now Sunset Tower) in Los Angeles; Hotel Maison de Ville and The Audubon Cottages in New Orleans; and many others. It has specialized in developing, repositioning and managing small luxury hotels and resorts (typically 20 to 175 rooms) for more than 25 years.

Getting There Roatan International Airport (RTB) is served on non-stop flights from the United States (Houston, Atlanta and Newark) on Continental and Delta.

For more information about The Resort Villas at Pristine Bay, contact Riley Sharman at rsharman@ResortVillasatPristineBay.com or 310.860.6251. You can also visit www.ResortVillasatPristineBay.com for more information.

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Welcome to Roatan The Island Jewel of the Western Caribbean

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he island of Roatan is a place few have seen, yet half a billion in luxury casitas and townhomes are currently under construction.

Roatan is magnificent. Clear water, great climate, lush, hilly, friendly, and modern in the ways you want in a resort destination. Indeed, Roatan is one of those few remaining places that seems untouched…and it’s a little over two hours from Texas!

Roatán, located between the islands of Útila and Guanaja, is the largest of Honduras’ Bay Islands. The island was formerly known as Ruatan and Rattan. It is approximately 60 kilometres (37 mi) long, and less than 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) across at its widest point.

The island consists of two municipalities (out of a total of four in the department): Jose Santos Guardiola in the east (named for the former president of Honduras) and Roatán (also including the Cayos Cochinos) further south in the west. The most populous town of the island is Coxen Hole, capital of Roatán municipality, located in the southwest. Other important towns include French Harbour, West End, and Oak Ridge, the capital of Jose Santos Guardiola municipality.

The easternmost quarter of the island is separated by a convoluted channel through the mangroves that is 15 meters wide on the average.

This section is called Helene, or Santa Elena in Spanish. Satellite islands at the eastern end are Morat, Barbaretta, and Pigeon Cay. Further west between French Harbour and Coxen Hole is Barefoot Cay. Known as Burial Key until 2001, Barefoot Cay now is privately owned and houses a luxury resort popular with celebrities.

Located near the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the largest barrier reef in the Caribbean Sea (second largest worldwide after Australia’s Great Barrier Reef), Roatán has become an important cruise ship and scuba diving destination in Honduras. Tourism is most important economic 4

sector, though fishing is also an important source of income for islanders.

Roatan is located within 50 minutes of LGS. The island is served by the Juan Manuel Gálvez International Airport.

HISTORY The pre-Columbian indigenous peoples of the Bay Islands are believed to have been related to Paya, Maya, Lenca or Jicaque, which were the cultures present on the mainland. Christopher Columbus on his fourth voyage (1502–1504) came to the islands as he visited the neighboring Bay Island of Guanaja. Soon after the Spanish began raiding the islands for slave labor. More devastating for Native American communities was exposure to Eurasian infectious diseases to which they had no immunity, such as smallpox and measles. Diseases ran in epidemics, and no indigenous people survived.

Throughout European colonial times, the Bay of Honduras attracted a diverse array of individual settlers, pirates, traders and military forces, engaged in various economic activities and playing out political struggles between the European powers, chiefly Britain and Spain.

Roatán and the other islands were used as frequent resting points for sea travelers. On several occasions, they were subject to military occupation. In 1723/1724 an approximately 20-year-old-man from New England, Philip Ashton, managed to survive as a castaway on the island for sixteen months until he was rescued (see Edward E. Leslie, Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls, 1988, pp. 100–120). During that time they were governed by self-proclaimed King Kyle Edward Chauncey, a redhaired white man leading mostly Spanish speakers among those of European descent.

In contesting with the Spanish for colonization of the Caribbean, the English occupied the Bay Islands on and off between 1550 and 1700.

During this time, buccaneers found the vacated, mostly unprotected

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The 20th century saw continued population growth resulting in increasing economic changes, and environmental challenges. A population boom began with an influx of Spanish-speaking Mestizo migrants from the Honduran mainland. In the last decades they tripled the original resident population. Mestizo migrants settled primarily in the urban areas of Coxen Hole and Barrio Los Fuertes (near French Harbour). In these areas Spanish is common, with English speakers more common among descendants of early colonists, as well as in the other areas inhabited chiefly by islanders rather than former mainlanders.

islands a haven for safe harbor and transport. English, French and Dutch pirates established settlements on the islands. They frequently raided the cumbersome Spanish cargo vessels carrying gold and other treasures from the New World to Spain.

In 1797, the British defeated the Black Carib, who had been supported by the French, in a battle for control of the Windward Caribbean island of St. Vincent. Weary of their resistance to British plans for sugar plantations, the British rounded up the St. Vincent Black Carib and deported them to Roatán. The majority of Black Carib migrated to Trujillo on mainland Honduras, but a portion remained to found the community of Punta Gorda on the northern coast of Roatán. The Black Carib, whose ancestry includes Arawak and African Maroons, remained in Punta Gorda, becoming the Bay Island’s first permanent post-Columbian settlers.

They also migrated from there to parts of the northern coast of Central America, becoming the foundation of the modern-day Garífuna culture.

The majority permanent population of Roatán originated from the Cayman Islands near Jamaica. They arrived in the 1830s shortly after Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1838. The changes in labor force disrupted the economic structure of Caymanian culture. Caymanians were largely a seafaring culture and were familiar with the area from turtle fishing and other activities. Former Caymanian slaveholders were among the first to settle in the seaside locations throughout primarily western Roatán.

Former slaves also migrated from the Cayman Islands, in larger number than planters, during the late 1830s and 1840s. Altogether, the former Caymanians became the largest cultural group on the island.

But in terms of population and economic influence, the mainlander influx was dwarfed by the overwhelming tourist presence in most recent years.

Numerous American, Canadian, British, New Zealand, Australian and South African settlers and entrepreneurs engaged chiefly in the fishing industry, and later, provided the foundation for attracting the tourist trade. The rapid and dramatic demographic changes that Roatán has experienced in the 21st century has contributed to the complexity of the environmental challenges of the island.

In 1998, Roatán suffered some damage from Hurricane Mitch, temporarily paralyzing most commercial activity. Native islanders claimed the storm broke three previously undisturbed Aguila shipwrecks.

CARACOLES The Caracol people are an English-speaking people who have been established in Northern Honduras (specifically, the Bay Islands) since the early 19th century. They are chiefly of European and British-AfroCaribbean descent. Caracol is Spanish for “conch, snail or shell”, and relates the people of the Bay Islands to their unique environment and their sea-faring culture. In its current usage, the term caracol refers to all people born in the Bay Islands region, and their descendants. The region of the Bay Islands encompasses the three major islands of Roatan, Utila, and Guanaja, and the smaller islands or keys. These people are also called “Islanders,” especially locally.

Over time the form of English spoken by the Caracol has changed.

The language differs mostly in morphology but also in pronunciation and accent and, to a lesser extent, in syntax and vocabulary, from the English of the other British Caribbean colonies. They are similar enough to be mutually intelligible.

For a brief period in the 1850s, Britain declared the Bay Islands its colony.

Within a decade the Crown ceded the territory formally back to Honduras. British colonists were sent though, and asked William Walker, a freebooter with a private army, to help end the crisis in 1860 by invading Honduras; he was captured upon landing in Trujillo and executed there.

In the latter half of the 19th century, the island populations grew steadily and established new settlements all over Roatán and the other islands.

Settlers came from all over the world and played a part in shaping the cultural face of the island. Islanders started a fruit trade industry which became profitable. By the 1870s it was purchased by American interests, most notably the New Orleans and Bay Islands Fruit Company. Later companies, the Standard Fruit and United Fruit Companies became the foundation for modern-day fruit companies, the industry which gave Honduras the sobriquet “banana republic”.

This article is republished from Wikipedia.

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Roatan • Bay Islands Honduras