Not far from Whim is the 16-acre St. George Village Botanical Garden, built around the ruins of another old plantation: the Estate St. George. It, too, is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Water Mill was built around 1830 and destroyed in an 1867 earthquake. Surviving are the blacksmith shop, the village bakery, lime kilns, water flumes and the ruins of the sugar cane factory. Today the grounds are dominated by more than 1,500 species of native and exotic plants.
St. Croix is the largest and least-developed of the U.S. Virgin Islands. It covers 84 square miles and has about 51,500 residents. The western part of the island is rain forest; the eastern end is rocky and arid.
It often is overlooked next to its more famous sister islands, St. Thomas and St. John. They are about 40 miles to the north.
Colorful Christiansted on the north coast is the largest
city on St. Croix. It features a historic district on the waterfront
with more than 100 brightly painted buildings from the 18th and 19th
centuries. It is one of the best-preserved towns in the Caribbean. An
old fortress, Fort Christiansvaern, was completed by the Danes in 1749
to protect the island from pirates, privateers and slave uprisings.
Buck
Island Reef National Monument off the north coast is one of the premier
diving-snorkeling spots in the Caribbean and the No. 1 tourist
attraction on St. Croix.
It covers more than 19,000 acres, mostly
below water, and preserves one of the finest marine gardens in the
Caribbean. It features imposing walls and gardens of coral,
concentrations of red, purple and blue sea fans, spectacular elkhorn and
brain corals and colorful fish. It is five miles from Christiansted and
1.5 miles offshore.
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