Beach Bars, Sainte-Anne

The beach at Sainte-Anne is lined with small bars and snack stalls that operate on island time: open when the weather is good, serving rum punches, fresh coconut water, and grilled fish to whoever is on the sand. This is the informal end of the south coast bar scene — no cocktail lists, no DJs, just plastic chairs, cold drinks, and the Caribbean Sea in front of you.

The best spot is wherever someone has set up a cooler and a barbecue grill. Weekends bring a larger local crowd, which is a good thing: these bars work best when they are full of people who come here regularly rather than tourists passing through. The accras sold at the snack stalls are often better than those in formal restaurants — fried in smaller batches and eaten immediately.

bars and cafes bar
A story
Sainte-Anne was a sugar town before it was a beach town. The shift came gradually in the second half of the twentieth century as tourism became more important to the Guadeloupean economy than cane. The beach bars that now line the sand replaced, in a sense, the economy that once ran on the backs of enslaved workers — a transition that took two centuries to complete.