How We Ranked the Caribbean’s Best Beaches, and Why the List Will Annoy You

The Ledger’s beach ranking judges the sand and the water, not the resort behind it. That single rule reshuffles every list you have seen.

Most beach rankings are really hotel rankings. Ours is not. The Ledger 10 judges the beach itself, the sand, the water, the setting and whether an ordinary person can walk onto it, and deliberately ignores the resort behind the tree line. That one rule produces a very different list.

It rewards places like Grenada’s Grand Anse, where a public beach and a vendors’ market coexist, and Anguilla’s Shoal Bay, long and open, over stretches privatized by a single property. It is an editorial position as much as a measurement: a great beach is one you can get to.

The list is meant to be argued with, which is the point of a ranking. It is also a small manifesto about who the coast belongs to. See the full Ledger 10, and tell us where we are wrong.