Cap Juluca, A Belmond Hotel

Cap Juluca's image is one of the Caribbean's most recognisable: a procession of brilliant-white, domed and arched Greco-Moorish villas set directly on the sand of Maundays Bay, a near-perfect crescent of powder-fine beach on Anguilla's western tip with the mountains of St Martin floating across the channel. The resort helped define barefoot luxury when it opened in the 1980s, and Belmond's comprehensive renovation has kept the architecture's romance while bringing rooms, pools and dining to contemporary standard.

Everything orbits the beach, which is routinely counted among the finest anywhere: guests step from terrace to sand in seconds, loungers are spaced for privacy rather than density, and the bay's protected water stays swimming-pool calm for most of the year. Interiors are breezy and pale—plastered arches, rattan, Moroccan touches—with deep terraces built for doing nothing at length. A main pool terrace, beach bars and a spa among the dunes complete the roster without cluttering it.

Anguilla itself supplies the supporting cast: a flat, easy-going island famed for beach shacks and serious kitchens in equal measure, with no cruise ships and no casinos. Dinner might be rum punches and grilled crayfish at a beach restaurant or a refined Mediterranean-Caribbean menu under the resort's arches. Cap Juluca is not about spectacle beyond the one it was built on—a mile of perfect sand, white domes and the light of the western Caribbean.