It’s a whole different side of Jamaica. GoldenEye was Ian Fleming’s estate on the island’s north coast, just down the road from Noël Coward’s place, and the desk in the flagship Fleming Villa is where he sat down to write all fourteen of his James Bond novels. It’s still as casual and low-key as you expect Jamaica to be, but with an undercurrent of colonial-era gentility that most of the island’s other properties can’t hope to match.

Though the original Georgian house on Strawberry Hill was destroyed in the hurricane of 1988, the new building maintains a traditional feel. The bungalows are built to meticulous nineteenth-century specifications. You sleep in mahogany four-poster beds shrouded in muslin, and gaze out at the stunning mountain landscape while swinging in your hammock. It epitomizes bygone colonial living at its finest, the perfect place to have a rum punch and wear white linen.

The Caves is a collection of twelve private cottages atop a cliff, overlooking the ocean, with plenty of jumping-off points to impress one’s companion and other guests. For those with a beach fetish, consider this: the sea looks better from higher up, and at The Caves it becomes your own private pool. Below, in the cliffside, are natural volcanic caves and grottos which can be explored whilst swimming, or set up for private candlelight dinners. The cottages themselves, designed by Greer-Ann and Bertram Saulter, are after the style of a tropical hut, with thatched roofs, natural ventilation, and construction of wood and stone, and each has a view of the Caribbean Sea.

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