Cruz Bay

St John was a Danish plantation island before Cruz Bay existed. By 1733 there were 109 plantations, 21 of them producing sugar, and that year the enslaved, led by people from the Akwamu kingdom of West Africa — among them a leader remembered as Breffu — overpowered the soldiers of the island's Danish fort and took control of most of the island; planters did not regain it until the end of May 1734. Cruz Bay itself was laid out in 1766 on the west coast, facing St Thomas, with a small fortification, the Battery.

The enslaved population peaked at about 2,600 in 1804. After emancipation the plantation economy declined; the island's population fell by 70 per cent between 1845 and 1945, and the last sugar factory closed in 1908. For a long time Coral Bay, on the far side of the island, was the commercial centre, and its people had easier links to Tortola than to St Thomas.

That changed in the 20th century. Investors bought old estates, and in 1956 Laurance Rockefeller gave his lands to the National Park Service on condition that they be protected from development. With the park's visitor centre and the ferries from St Thomas, Cruz Bay became the island's gateway. The Cruz Bay Town Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016. In September 2017 Hurricane Irma struck the island and Maria followed; the park reopened that December, but visitor numbers fell to about 112,000 in 2018, against an average of more than 450,000 a year in the previous decade.

St John calls itself Love City, and Cruz Bay has the easy, small-town manner of a place where residents, boat crews and visitors share the same few streets. The culture is Afro-Caribbean, rooted in the island's plantation past and in memory of the 1733 revolt, one of the earliest large uprisings of the enslaved in the Americas.

Carnival is the island's great celebration. While St Thomas holds its carnival in April and May and St Croix in December and January, St John's comes in June and July, with the parades, food fairs and J'ouvert morning celebrations found across the territory. Quelbe, the traditional music of the Virgin Islands, also called scratch or fungi music, is heard across the territory.

Much of the island's identity is bound up with the national park, which covers most of its land and shapes everything from where houses can be built to how the beaches are run. The harbour is filled with sailing boats from around the world.

Cruz Bay had 2,772 people at the 2020 census, out of 3,881 on the whole of St John. It is the island's largest commercial centre and its main port, with a post office, the public library, the headquarters of the National Park Service and the offices of US Customs and Immigration all close to the waterfront.

The economy depends almost entirely on tourism, and the shops and restaurants of the town serve residents and visitors alike. The waterfront is busy all day: barges carry cars across from Red Hook, passenger ferries arrive hourly from St Thomas, and in winter cruise passengers come ashore by tender from ships anchored offshore.

Because most of the island is national park, Cruz Bay and Coral Bay hold most of its shops and services. The weekday bus over Centerline Road links the two settlements every hour. St John lies about four miles east of St Thomas and four miles south-west of Tortola.

Cruz Bay eats as the rest of the Virgin Islands does. Fungi, pronounced "foon-gee", is a stiff cornmeal dish served with boiled fish or saltfish; callaloo is a soup of leafy greens; and for snacks there is paté, fried dough filled with beef, chicken, conch or saltfish, and johnnycake, fried dough originally known as "journey cake". Paté is often compared to an empanada, and conch fritters are another island snack.

The town's restaurants range from beach bars and casual places near the ferry dock to the restaurants of Mongoose Junction. Rum drinks are taken at outdoor tables around the square, and duty-free liquor is sold in town. Popular cold drinks include maubi, brewed from tree bark, sorrel, soursop, sea moss and passion fruit juice.

Many visitors renting houses stock up at the supermarket within walking distance of the dock, and Trunk Bay, inside the national park, has its own snack bar beside the beach.