South Atlantic island’s only luxury hotel is right in the middle of the action
Many hotels around the world harp on about their location and how useful and central it is for visitors wanting to explore a particular destination. But not many destinations are like Jamestown, the capital of St Helena. It’s the capital of the country and the island’s single largest collection of buildings – many of them historical and many fulfilling practical purposes as homes, shops, schools, and administrative centres.
It’s also, because of the restrictions imposed by the rugged cliffs that rise on either side of it, a town that’s about as big as it’s ever going to be, a mile long up the length of the valley and no more than a couple of hundred metres wide at its most extensive.
Staying in such a place as a visitor means maximum potential for exploration, and the Mantis St Helena hotel is a brilliant base for whatever plans you have made. The older part of the establishment takes up the space once occupied by the officers’ barracks of the East India Company, built in 1774. As you’d expect, generals and the like were never going to settle for bunk beds and handbasins, so the three upstairs rooms overlooking Main Street, each featuring three picture windows, are large and beautifully appointed – polished wooden floors, plush chairs (including one in the bathroom, should you need a break between ablutions), a shower large enough for a foam party, and a TV on which you can keep tabs on the week’s international sporting events. If you press your face up against the glass, you can see the yachts in the harbour, too.
The newer part of the hotel, built behind the old barracks, is a much more recent build, with rooms spread over three levels around a chequerboard terrace, making it easily the largest accommodation block on the island.
Immersed in History
Next door is St James Church. There has been a church structure of some kind in that spot since the beginning of the 16th century, when Portuguese sailors first stumbled across the island in the vastness of the South Atlantic and erected a wooden room in which they could worship when they were harboured there. The current church was also part of the 1774 construction wave, with its shiny spire added to the architecture in 2016.
Within a whole minute’s walk from the hotel’s front door are the city’s museum, the wharf where the island’s supplies have been rowed or motored ashore for centuries, the 18th-century castle with its fortifications and defensive moat, the landscaped Castle Gardens and the bottom of the terrifyingly steep Jacob’s Ladder, the huge staircase that leads up to the Ladder Hill Fort, take all the oxygen in your lungs with you.
For lazy guests, this is a remarkable privilege. You hardly need to take 100 steps from where you wake up to explore, in depth, 500 years’ worth of history and culture and a way of life entirely different from living in a big city (regardless of where you’re from, unless you also live in a country’s capital populated by considerably fewer than 1,000 people). Living in town, as you will be for the duration of your stay at the Mantis, you’ll get to know a number of the locals and likely be invited to join them in some of their rituals, which might include activities as mainstream as gathering in the hotel bar for a nightcap or something as site-specific as joining general manager Ian Williams and a group of other locals for a sunset swim in the ocean, finning out to the wreck of the SS Papanui to marvel at the scale of the ship, scuttled in the bay after it had to make an emergency diversion into the harbour when on fire during a 1911 voyage.
Global Community
Airlink flights arrive once a week, and however full they are, they provide a cosmopolitan boost to the island community. The Mantis restaurant often plays host not only to those curious newcomers, many of them from the UK (there are still a number of familial links between the populations) as well as everywhere from Edenvale to Estonia, but also to the great and good of the island, who frequent the place to celebrate major events or to gather for meetings. In the latter case, sitting at a nearby table and keeping an ear open allows for some excellent insight into whatever is going on or coming up in the community. It’s not eavesdropping if the courtyard acoustics give you no choice – and the church spire and the necklace of lights fastened up the length of Jacob’s Ladder provide a striking visual focus as you tuck into a delicious steak.
There are different storytelling opportunities available over breakfast, where you’ll likely see other guests you’ve crossed paths with once or twice over the previous couple of days and with whom you can compare notes about which island tour is the most interesting, which natural phenomenon is most mind-blowing, which hike is most scenic, or how convoluted the journey of some of the ingredients in your meal has been, given the incredible remoteness of the island on which you’re staying.
St Helena is not a resort island in the same sense as the white sand beaches and cocktails with umbrellas of Mauritius or the Seychelles or wherever and – not but – for that reason it is fascinating to experience.
Text and photography | Bruce Dennill
For more information or to book a stay, go to mantiscollection.com or sthelenatourism.com.
