Search results for "john"

Although 350 islands make up the Archipielago de los Canarreos, Isla de la Juventud is by far the biggest of them and this region is administered from the island's capital, Nueva Gerona. Much of the island is flat and the Cienaga de Lanier is Cuba's second-largest swamp. Isla de la Juventud is the least populated region of Cuba, with most people living in the north of the island. Once known as Parrot Island, it was a hideout for pirates like Francis Drake, John Hawkins, Thomas Baskerville and Henry Morgan, and it inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. The local economy ...

The Exumas were settled in 1783 by American Loyalists who wanted to remain true to the British king after the United States won the American Revolutionary War. They reassembled their former way of life in these islands, complete with cotton plantations and African slaves. Remnants of these plantations still remain. Lord John Rolle was a major landowner and one of the most powerful Loyalists. When he freed his slaves in 1835, he bequeathed his land to them for life. In gratitude, several towns are named after him and many of the people in The Exumas wear the name of "Rolle" with pride. They...

If you adjust the dollars for inflation, John D. Rockefeller was twice as wealthy as Bill Gates (at the height of the tech boom). So, in the late 1800s, when Rockefeller and a few of his wealthy playmates (Astor, Gould, Morgan among them) settled on Jekyll Island as a winter getaway, they formed what has been called the richest, most exclusive club in the world. How rich? It’s been estimated that the membership of Jekyll Island Club once represented one-sixth of the world’s wealth. The clubhouse and many of the mansion-sized “cottages” they built still stand today, but the once-private bar...

It's not hard to fall in love with an island. In the 1950s an American sailor fell hard for the beautiful bays, beaches, and steep hills of St. John, and because the sailor happened to be Laurance Rockefeller, he bought more than half of the island. Luckily for all of us, Rockefeller gave away most of his purchase to help create Virgin Islands National Park. Today that 11,000-acre park is an oasis of untrammeled nature in the U. S. Virgin Islands. You'll need a 4X4 to cover most of the island, and seasoned visitors to the island often arrive with both hiking boots and swim fins in ...

As you drive south into the Florida Keys, you’ll see the signs for the first of the islands…Key Largo. If you’re a fan of old movies, you’ll probably think of Bogart and Bacall, trapped with some gangsters in a hotel during a hurricane. Key Largo was mostly filmed on a Hollywood sound stage, but the script was written in the island’s only hotel at the time, and the 1948 classic helped create the mystique of the keys as the last-chance, tropical end-of-the-road on the Atlantic Seaboard. Today Key Largo, the longest in the island chain, is a popular bedroom community and a favorite stop for ...

In 1940, author John Steinbeck and his marine biologist friend, Ed Ricketts, journeyed into the seldom-visited Gulf of California to begin a Baja collecting expedition that was later immortalized in the book The Log from the Sea of Cortez. And what makes Baja’s many islands magical is that now, six decades after Steinbeck’s visit, they remain virtually unchanged. Which is why these remote, mostly uninhabited islands have become a prime destination for adventurous travelers looking for that rare combination of desert and blue sea. Not all of isles bordering the 800-mile-long peninsula a...

Discover a city where real estate titles date back to the Kings of Spain. Stroll the palm-lined streets and discover gingerbread mansions, tin-roofed conch houses, the John Audubon House and Ernest Hemingway's home. Walk in the footsteps of Thomas Edison, Lou Gehrig, Harry Truman, and Tennessee Williams. Gaze at the fabled treasure of the galleon Atocha. Discover tomorrow's fine art treasures by Key West's well-known and unknown artists. In Key West, you can visit these and a host of other attractions by taking advantage of convenient public transportation, taxis, pedi-cabs, tour t...