One Week in Anguilla: Offbeat Itinerary
Seven days in Anguilla is where the itinerary honestly runs out of new material well before day seven arrives. By day four you have covered both headline beaches, spent a morning on a cay, and looped the whole island by car in under an hour, so a full week does not buy a longer list of sights, it buys a second cay day, a St Martin ferry crossing for something entirely different, and enough slack to sit still on a beach you already like instead of chasing a sixth attraction that does not exist. Prices still run on the East Caribbean dollar, pegged at a flat EC$2.70 to US$1 since 1976, and a week of pace does not make this British Overseas Territory any cheaper.
This route nests inside the 6-day plan with a second unstructured day tacked onto the end; the 4-day and 5-day versions cover the same spine minus the St Martin crossing and the extra slow day. Starting from scratch, the 2-day and 3-day plans cover only the headline beaches and the first cay day.
Book these before you go:
- A Sandy Island or Prickly Pear cay tour : calm-weather days fill the outbound boats fast on both cays, so lock in whichever one you are doing first rather than hoping for a spare seat at Sandy Ground
- A Little Bay or reef snorkel trip : worth booking if you would rather arrive by boat than take the cliffside rope scramble down to the cove
- A Meads Bay or Rendezvous Bay stay : the west-end resort row sells out first in the December-April dry season, exactly when a seven-night trip needs a fixed base for the long haul
- A St Martin day-trip tour from Anguilla : the public ferry runs a fixed schedule either way, but a packaged tour maps out the shopping and casino stops for anyone who would rather not plan the Marigot-to-Dutch-side leg themselves
| Day | Focus | Travel time | Rough daily cost (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arrival via SXM and ferry, Shoal Bay East | ~25 min ferry, then taxi | ~120-180 |
| 2 | Meads Bay, Rendezvous Bay, the Sunday jump-up | taxi hops, 10-20 min each | ~130-200 |
| 3 | Sandy Island cay day | ~5 min boat from Sandy Ground | ~90-150 |
| 4 | Island loop by rental car, Little Bay, Scilly Cay lobster lunch | ~45 min end-to-end drive | ~110-180 |
| 5 | Unstructured slow day, favorite beach or Wallblake House | none required | ~60-120 |
| 6 | St Martin/Sint Maarten day trip via ferry | ~25 min ferry each way | ~150-250 |
| 7 | Second slow day, or Prickly Pear for a third cay outing | none, or ~5 min boat | ~60-160 |
Day 1: Shoal Bay East and the No-Cruise-Ship Coastline
Most Anguilla trips begin at Princess Juliana International Airport (SXM) on Sint Maarten, not on Anguilla itself. The island’s own airport, Clayton J. Lloyd (AXA), handles a handful of regional flights and, some years, a Miami nonstop, but the standard route for a first-time seven-day trip is SXM first, then the public ferry from Marigot to Blowing Point: about 20-25 minutes across open water, eight scheduled crossings a day, no reservation required. Budget a separate taxi between the airport and the Marigot ferry pier, since the airport sits on the Dutch side and the boat leaves from the French one.
Base yourself on the west end, Meads Bay or Sandy Ground both work well for a week, and spend the afternoon at Shoal Bay East, two miles of pale sand with a reef close enough to snorkel straight off the beach. There is no entry fee, here or at any of Anguilla’s 33 beaches , because the island has no cruise dock, no casino and no high-rise hotel by deliberate policy, not by accident. Pick whichever beach shack is grilling something that afternoon and call it day one.
Day 2: Meads Bay, Rendezvous Bay and the Sunday Jump-Up
Meads Bay is the glossiest stretch on the island, turquoise water backed by a resort row that includes Blanchards, the closest thing Anguilla has to a landmark restaurant. Its casual Beach Shack arm runs 11:30am to 8pm, closed Sunday, walk-ins welcome; save the formal dining room for one splurge night, since a cheap Anguilla dinner is not really on the menu anywhere on this island, and the tourism board’s own count of 100-plus restaurants says more about density than it does about bargains.
Move to Rendezvous Bay in the afternoon, a long quiet beach that keeps landing on Caribbean best-beach lists for reasons that have nothing to do with amenities and everything to do with a clean sightline across the channel to St Martin. Two beach bars anchor it, Sunshine Shack and the Dune Preserve, the latter owned by Anguillian reggae musician Bankie Banx and home to the Moonsplash festival most years around March. Land on a Sunday and ask around for the island-wide jump-up, a running tradition of live-music beach parties hosted at several bars at once, not one fixed event at one venue.
Day 3: Sandy Island, the First Cay Day
Skip a third straight beach afternoon and take the boat instead. Sandy Island is a sandbar islet about five minutes off Sandy Ground, small enough to circle on foot in a few minutes, with its own bar and restaurant, hammocks strung between a handful of palms and, some days, an actual masseuse working the sand. The boat operators running the crossing shift season to season, so ask at Sandy Ground or your hotel desk for whoever is currently doing the run rather than assuming a posted timetable; this is a small-operator island where the schedule is more of a suggestion.
A cay day beats a fourth beach day, and on a seven-day trip you get to make that trade twice. The boat ride and the lunch are different from anything on the mainland in a way another stretch of identical white sand is not, which is exactly why day seven leaves the door open to a second one.
Day 4: Little Bay, the Island Loop and Scilly Cay’s Wave-Down Lunch
Rent a car for day four. It needs a temporary Anguilla driving permit bought through the rental company, cited at roughly $25 for three months or $15 for a short stay, plus your home license, and it buys you the one thing a taxi cannot: a full loop of the island in a single unhurried morning, since Anguilla runs tip to tip in about 45 minutes flat. Drive west past Maundays Bay, effectively Cap Juluca’s private beach and worth a look even if you are not staying there, then cut across toward the north coast for Little Bay, a secluded cove reached by a rope-assisted scramble down the cliffside. Check current conditions on that rope before committing to the climb; a short boat transfer from Sandy Ground covers the same cove without the scramble.
Finish the loop at Island Harbour on the east end for Scilly Cay, the kind of place that does not really have a booking system so much as a pier. Stand at the water’s edge and wave, and a dinghy motors across to collect you for grilled lobster and a rum punch strong enough to explain why nobody rushes lunch here. Scilly Cay has historically kept limited hours, commonly cited as Wednesday, Friday and Sunday for lunch only, so confirm the current open days before building your afternoon around it. Remember driving is on the left, a British-territory habit that catches out plenty of visitors arriving straight from right-hand-drive St Martin.
Day 5: The First Slow Day, Because Pace Beats a Fifth Sight
Anguilla does not have a fifth headline sight waiting for day five, and pretending otherwise is how itineraries end up padded with a stop nobody actually wanted. The honest plan: sleep in, skip the taxi, and go back to whichever beach earned your loyalty on day one or two, Shoal Bay East for the reef, Meads Bay for the resort-row polish, or Rendezvous Bay if the Sunday jump-up won you over. If a slow morning still needs one small stop, the Wallblake House in The Valley, a restored 1780s plantation house turned local history site, is a genuinely low-key half-hour rather than a full excursion.
This is not the trip winding down, just the first of two deliberate pauses. Two days from now you are on a ferry to a different island entirely, and after that there is room for one more open day, so treat day five as practice at doing nothing rather than the last chance to relax.
Day 6: A St Martin Day Trip, on Purpose
Take the same public ferry you arrived on, this time Blowing Point to Marigot and back, roughly 20-25 minutes each way with eight scheduled crossings daily and no reservation needed for a same-day return; budget around $60 round trip once the fare and departure tax are both counted. Marigot, the French-side capital, is worth a slow morning for its waterfront market and boutiques, genuinely different shopping than anything on Anguilla, which by policy has none of the casino or duty-free scene either side of St Martin built up. Cross to the Dutch side, whose capital Philipsburg holds the casinos Anguilla deliberately does not have, for an afternoon that trades Anguilla’s quiet for a livelier, more built-up Caribbean pace.
Keep the two islands straight in your head while you are there: St Martin and Sint Maarten are a single island split French and Dutch, an entirely separate jurisdiction from British Anguilla, not a suburb of it, even though the ferry ride between them takes less time than a long lunch. A livelier dinner scene is the honest reason to make this crossing, not sightseeing, since the point of day six is contrast, not more of the same beach-and-cay rhythm.
Day 7: A Second Slow Day, or Prickly Pear If You Are Not Done With Boats
By day seven there is genuinely nothing new left on the checklist, so this day is deliberately open-ended. Option one: repeat whatever beach or cay won you over earlier in the week, no plan required. Option two, for anyone who liked the boat ride on day three more than they expected: Prickly Pear, a second cay a short hop from Sandy Ground with two long-running beach kitchens, Agatha’s and Johnno’s, plus snorkeling that holds up against Sandy Island’s. Neither option is the “right” answer, and that is the honest point of a seven-day Anguilla trip: the extra days buy you the choice, not a longer list of must-sees.
Whichever way day seven goes, keep it low-key. Anything that needs a boat reservation booked weeks out or a rental-car return deadline defeats the purpose of the day, which exists purely because a week here has more time than the island has fresh sights to fill it with.
Is Anguilla Part of St Martin?
No. Anguilla is a British Overseas Territory, with King Charles III as head of state through a resident Governor and its own elected House of Assembly running domestic affairs. St Martin and Sint Maarten, the French-Dutch island 12 miles south, are separate jurisdictions entirely. The mix-up is understandable, since nearly every visitor flies into St Martin’s airport and ferries over from there, but Anguilla was briefly grouped with St Kitts and Nevis instead, until a 1967 revolution ended that arrangement for good.
Do You Actually Need a Full Week in Anguilla?
Not for sights, no. The island’s headline beaches, the first cay, and a full driving loop are done by day four, and nothing on days five through seven is a “must-see” in the way Shoal Bay East or Scilly Cay are. What a full week genuinely buys is pace: a slow day with no agenda, a St Martin crossing that is a real change of scene rather than more of the same, and the option of a second cay day if you want it. Three or four days covers Anguilla’s sights faster; seven just covers them slower.
Is Anguilla Safe for a Week-Long Trip?
Yes, with one caveat worth stating plainly rather than glossing over. The UK Foreign Office’s current Anguilla safety advisory notes a spike in gang-related crime involving guns and robbery, serious enough that the island held a community anti-gun-violence march in August 2025, with standard precautions attached: avoid isolated areas after dark, do not resist during a robbery, keep valuables out of sight. None of that describes a typical week-long beach-and-cay itinerary, and Anguilla remains low-key by regional standards, but check the current advisory before you fly rather than assuming a quiet boat-racing island carries no advisory at all.
Practical Notes
Check the current ferry schedule before you fly, since fares and departure taxes are cited differently across sources and are worth confirming at the pier rather than guessing, especially with a St Martin round trip added to the week. Pack for a dry, sunny island with no rainforest interior to duck into if a shower rolls through, so sun protection matters more than a raincoat, and note that hurricane season officially runs June through November; a seven-day trip that falls in that window is worth pairing with flexible booking, even though a dry-season week will likely never notice it. If the racing flags strung along Sandy Ground’s harbor front look oddly serious for a beach vacation, that is because they are: sailing locally-built wooden boats is Anguilla’s national sport, a tradition traced to early-1900s laborers racing each other home from work on neighboring islands. Ask when the next race is, and spend one of your two slow days on the beach watching for it instead of booking a third cay.