Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Marigot
Population: 32,000+
Language: French,English and Saint Martin Creole.
1 – Marigot (also above)
The capital of the French side sits on a sheltered west-coast bay and takes its name from the marshes it was built beside; it grew into a proper town in the 18th century on sugar, salt, cotton and rum.
Fort Louis, put up in 1789 to guard the warehouses below, is a short climb from the waterfront and worth it at sunset; down at the harbour the market sells fish, spices and guavaberry liqueur, and the streets behind it are lined with pastel gingerbread houses.
The whole island is the smallest landmass on earth divided between two nations — France and the Netherlands agreed the split at the Treaty of Concordia on 23 March 1648, which is generally reckoned the oldest border treaty still in force anywhere, and you can drive across it without so much as slowing down.
2 – Grand Case
A single street of a fishing village strung along a beach on the north-west coast, Grand Case has turned itself into what the island bills as the gourmet capital of the Caribbean.
The boulevard is lined with restaurants at one end and lolos at the other — open-sided barbecue shacks with paper plates and wooden benches, grilling ribs, snapper and lobster — and the bay in front is calm enough for easy snorkelling.
For a place this size the numbers are absurd: an island of 86 square kilometres with something like 300 restaurants and residents from over a hundred different countries, most of the eating concentrated along this one stretch of road.
3 – Orient Bay
A two-kilometre curve of white sand on the Atlantic side, Orient Bay has been the island’s best-known beach since the 1970s, and part of it sits inside the Saint-Martin national nature reserve.
Beach clubs, loungers and watersports run along most of it, with Green Cay just offshore and boats out to Pinel Island from the next bay north.
They call it the Saint-Tropez of the Caribbean, and its southern end holds the only officially sanctioned naturist beach on the island — the resort that made it famous, Club Orient, was destroyed by Hurricane Irma in September 2017 and the scars are still visible.
4 – Pic Paradis
At 424 metres, Pic Paradis is the highest point on the island, a forested ridge in the middle of the French side with the last real stretch of native woodland on Saint Martin below it.
Trails run up through the trees to two lookout points, with the whole island laid out beneath you — both coasts, both countries, and Anguilla, Saba and Saint Barthélemy on the horizon.
The usual way up starts at Loterie Farm, an old mango and sugar plantation on the slopes that’s now a private reserve with ziplines, a spring-fed pool and a treehouse bar — and from the summit you can see the Dutch side’s airport, where jets come in low over a beach.