By Luisita Lopez Torregrosanov From New York Times

Antigua lets you in slowly. It reveals itself cautiously, at its own unhurried pace. You’ll miss it if you turn away too quickly.

I saw what many people see when I awoke the first morning of my trip there this summer. The pale light of dawn was seeping into my room, and the tiny yellow and black birds flapped their wings as they made their way through the thick grove of palm fronds, bougainvillea and banana trees outside my balcony. Then came the swish of the gardener’s broom on the paths below and the steady roll of the sea a few yards away. Not much later, I was trudging on sole-burning sand and standing at the cool water’s edge, squinting at the blazing sun.

This is what draws thousands of visitors to Antigua year after year — the sybaritic resorts and the 365 brilliant, largely pristine beaches, sheltered bays, harbors and coves. The island, a 9-by-12-mile speck of hills with a jagged coastline, claims famous residents and visitors (Eric Clapton has a home here, Oprah visits), multimillionaire manors like the Mellon estate at the exclusive Mill Reef Club, and a world-class sailing regatta at English Harbour, home of the 18th-century British Navy station named after Horatio Nelson.

Caribbean connoisseurs can tell the difference between Antigua (pronounced An-TEE-gah) and Anguilla, St. Lucia and St. Barts, but many tourists who only want an island getaway fly in, drive from airport to hotel, visit a few historic sites and socialize mainly with fellow like-minded guests.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find more.

“Antigua is two worlds. On one side there’s all this — sandy beaches and blue seas — and on the other, the buried history,” Reginald Murphy, the island’s pre-eminent archaeologist, said one day over a soft drink at an outdoor table at the Siboney Beach Club, the small resort where I was staying. “There’s a dark side.”

Mr. Murphy has spent his days deep in the dark history, overseeing excavations in English Harbour and Betty’s Hope, a major sugar plantation, and the discovery of human skeletons — believed to be the remains of young British sailors dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries — at Galleon Beach several years ago.

They are a reminder of the lesser-known narrative of the island, a onetime colonial hub of sugar and slavery. Like many of its Caribbean neighbors, it has changed hands repeatedly: the Siboney, Arawaks and the Caribs saw their island seized by the Spanish, then the British, who brought along African slaves. They were emancipated in 1834, and eventually, in 1981, Antigua became independent. What remains is a population estimated at 91,295 — 91 percent black, 4.4 percent mixed race and 1.7 percent white, who work in light industries, including tourism, which draws about 250,000 people a year.

The clash of cultures in Antigua — one black and primarily middle- and low-income, the other white and predominantly rich — that Jamaica Kincaid describes in her 1988 memoir, “A Small Place,” seems less corrosive and hostile now than what she experienced in the 1950s and early ’60s. But racial and class distinctions are still visible. Slavery is a distant if troubling memory for many people, a centuries-old scar, and the 200 sugar mills and estates lie mainly forgotten, in ruins, surrounded by scrub vegetation and herds of goats and sheep that seem to overrun the island.

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While Mr. Murphy and I spoke about this, I took in the placid mood and surroundings of the Siboney. Flowers and palms were flourishing despite Antigua’s perennial drought; the front desk was staffed with sharp, jovial women; an old woman in a floppy hat sold T-shirts and beachwear under a coconut tree; a middle-aged couple ventured into the water under the bristling midday sun; a guest slept on a lounge chair in the shade, cooled by the sea breeze.

It was a contrast to the history Mr. Murphy had been telling me. Once you know that the other Antigua exists, seeing the part laid out for vacationers starts to feel lacking. I’d gotten to know that part of the island on my first visit 20 years ago. This time, I’d revisit it but also veer slightly beyond the Edenic coast to get a sense of the whole of Antigua.

There is no better place to start a tour of the glamorous side of Antigua than Galley Bay Resort & Spa, a 40-acre manicured refuge of white-painted cottages, sea grape trees, coconut palms and a bounty of yellow and orange blooms. From the Siboney, it was a 20-minute ride, and on the way, I asked my driver, Martin Edwards, a spry 70-year-old, to take me through St. John’s, the capital. Streets teemed with ­people and the sounds of Caribbean music emanated from boomboxes. Food stalls, cars, S.U.V’s vans and trucks clogged the lanes.

As we passed wood-and-cinder-block homes and low-rise buildings, bars, dancehalls and banks (offshore banking is big here), Mr. Edwards complained about the slow economy (unemployment is 11 percent) and the influx of immigrants from Jamaica, Dominica, Guyana and the Dominican Republic, all poorer than Antigua, who were taking jobs away from the locals. Later, I asked a young Jamaican woman about this and she shook her head. “We’re not taking jobs away from them,” she said. “We’ll do a job for $8 an hour, but they won’t do it for $12.”

Over at Galley Bay Resort, there was no room available, although its all-inclusive rate for a single in the low April-December 2014 season ran $840 a night. At the al fresco restaurant, birds flew in and out, and guests in beach hats and sunglasses chatted over lunches of salads, cold cuts, fish and grilled vegetables. While I was looking over the menu, the restaurant manager came over to my table and to my amazement recognized me from 20 years back, when I had stayed at Galley Bay for eight days (she was then a housemaid).

Resorts like Galley Bay are still powered largely by black bartenders, waitresses and clerks and white, foreign patrons. It mirrors the symbiotic relationship throughout much of the Caribbean, where money filters from Americans and Europeans to locals. The nation is more fortunate than those on many islands, though. Its tourism has made it enjoy a higher per-capita income than many fellow islands — an estimated $18,400 a year in 2013, according to C.I.A. World Factbook estimates. That placed it 59th in the world, ahead of hundreds of bigger nations like Russia, Brazil and China.

Tourism is Antigua’s bread and butter, its main source of income and employment — and sometimes its curse. It brings wealth and it can take it away when tourists don’t come. Its fortune is subject to fashion and whim, weather and the caprice of travelers. Because 60 percent of the island’s GDP comes from tourism, it has been slow to recover from the global recession.

But you wouldn’t know that from sitting at Galley Bay. Around the open-air bar, I flopped back into a low, cushioned wicker armchair under a humming ceiling fan. Soon it was busy with guests ordering up margaritas and mojitos. I met a wedding party; a Texas family celebrating the return of a daughter from Afghanistan; a middle-aged couple from Nebraska. The festive mood was infectious. From my comfy chair, I looked on the flat, translucent sea and the two rocky promontories that bracket Galley Bay, giving it a cocooning effect. A day there felt like a week away from the world.

Tourism served with a side of history was a specialty at my next stop, English Harbour, so named because it became a regular base for the British Navy in the 18th century. After a 45-minute spiraling, bumpy ride there down a two-lane road, I arrived at a place I scarcely recognized. The same centuries-old structures were standing, but two decades ago the restaurants were crowded, bars and clubs hopping, with young people of all races dancing together.

This time the place was quiet. The popular Admiral’s Inn on Nelson’s Dockyard was closed for repairs, and the charming Copper and Lumber Store Hotel was eerily empty — in fact, I would be the only guest that night. Even restaurants, usually busy, were closed for the day. Still, wandering the grounds that served as a naval base while Admiral Nelson helped defend the British West Indies from French incursion perhaps demanded some quiet reflection.

But I needed a dose of local culture. I took a taxi to Shirley Heights Lookout, the top of a hill above English Harbour.

Sundays on Shirley Heights are an island tradition and a favorite tourist entertainment. Visitors come by the busloads, in taxis and vans, for an afternoon in the cooling mountain air, for the bopping sounds of steel-drum bands and some of the best spicy barbecue in Antigua. Elbowing my way through the crowd, I lined up behind dozens of fellow tourists for a bite and a cold Wadadli beer. For less than $10, I got some chicken and a drink.

Carrying the paper plate and a plastic cup, I navigated through the throng to find a vacant spot at a picnic table set under a makeshift cover. A young couple was making out nearby, and a couple of parents were having no success quieting their screeching young children. Looking around, I saw few locals, mainly the ones serving customers at the food stalls, where the lines were getting longer. After wolfing down my lunch, I joined a boisterous crowd circling several young couples twisting and bopping to the fast tempo of steel drums. Barbecue and steel drums, nothing could be more Antiguan. And toward the end of that lazy afternoon, there was the memorable sight of the sun setting over English Harbour.

I would head inland the next day to get a better grasp of the island’s colonial remnants. I met Mr. Murphy, and we drove in his cranky Jeep through roadside villages of simple homes with tin roofs and meager yards. He’d periodically point out sites of interest — here is Bethesda, where slaves were first educated, a quiet village with a handful of flat-roofed cinder block buildings, and here’s All Saints, a crossroads with a church on each corner. We buzzed by body shops, stands with fruit and vegetables, a few schools and municipal buildings.

I found out about Antigua from an article in Islands magazine about Sailing Week. I wangled rooms for me and a friend at the Admiral’s Inn…

After 2 years in Antigua in the Peace Corps I must say this is a good introduction but there is so MUCH more Visit the museum to start with,…

Not a mention of the St John’s Cricket Ground. Antigua is the home of a number of West Indian cricketing greats

“That’s one big change,” he said, drawing my attention to the cars and vans parked by homes we passed. “Everyone, no matter how poor, has a car. Used to be people rode on mules up in the hills.” Just then we passed a boy straddling a skinny mule.

Minutes later, down a dusty track off the road, we reached Betty’s Hope, a fenced-in mound surrounded by overgrown vegetation. A few trees gave shade. We stepped gingerly around broken branches, ancient artifacts, broken pottery, glass shards and other detritus of an archaeological excavation. A dozen schoolchildren in black and orange uniforms played at the site’s museum, a onetime cotton storage room. In the center of the room was a model of the original plantation, featuring figurines of slaves and livestock and windmills, slave barracks, the boiling house where cane juice was turned into sugar and the distillery where rum was made. Drawings, pictures and maps, artifacts recovered nearby and estate plans adorned the museum walls.

A half dozen or so college-age student volunteers from around the world were huddling and squatting at a cordoned area where Mr. Murphy believed the slave barracks once stood. “Be careful, don’t scrape too hard,” the team’s leader, Georgia L. Fox, an anthropologist and archaeologist from California State University at Chico, cautioned her volunteers.

Mr. Murphy, who was born in Antigua and got his doctorate at Calgary University in Canada, has worked with Ms. Fox for several years. They’ve got much in common. He has developed a field research program in archaeology, has raised millions of dollars for research and restoration on Antigua and heads the International Association for Caribbean Archaeology. Professor Fox is the head archaeologist at Betty’s Hope Plantation, a field school designated by the American Anthropological Association. They talked shop awhile, and then he walked around the mound, picked up a piece of pottery, examined it, threw it over his shoulder and climbed over to the site of the plantation’s house, giving me a tour, pointing out where the kitchen had stood, the large pool-size cistern that had held rain water, and the sugar windmill he restored in 1995.

Many Antiguans opposed the restoration of Betty’s Hope, he told me. They saw it as a monument to the dark past. But over time they’ve come around. “The site is now shared by all, as we intended,” he said. “It is used for education, cultural events, research and recreation. That was my original intention.” Every year on Emancipation Day, Aug. 1, there’s a celebration there.

Everyone knows Mr. T, Antony Johnson, who’s been in Antigua for more than 50 years. An English-Australian who served in the Australian army in World War II, he had a seafarer’s spirit and arrived in Antigua in 1959 on a converted trawler he had been hired to sail. He stayed and built hotels and homes in Antigua and nearby islands and ran his own water-sports business. In 1981, he designed and built a small seafront resort on a sand patch on Dickenson Bay. He called it Siboney Beach Club, after the indigenous tribe and a Cuban love song he will sing unprompted, eyes closed, shoulders swaying.

An agile 90-year-old with ageless memory, he traces tourism on the island to two major postwar developments: one, the advent of Pan Am flights, bringing movie stars, executives and industrialists; two, a band of former servicemen from Britain, Australia and the United States who saw the island’s tourism potential. An American pilot built Curtain Bluff in 1962 on the southwest coast. A British airman built Blue Waters in the early 1960s, a terraced resort in the northern part of the island, and an English naval officer sailed into English Harbour in 1949, found it in ruins, helped finance its restoration, founded a yacht charter company and started Antigua Sailing Week, one of the most popular yacht racing events in the Caribbean.

The precursor, if not the model, for these elite hotels was the exclusive Mill Reef Club, founded by an American architect, Robertson (Happy) Ward, in 1947. He envisioned a secluded resort for blue bloods like the DuPonts and the philanthropist and banking heir Paul Mellon and his wife, Rachel Lambert Mellon, known as Bunny. Mill Reef lived up to his original plan, retaining its low-key exclusivity for over half a century. Mrs. Mellon died in March at the age of 103, and the sale of the Mellon estate is being conducted by Sotheby’s this month.

“Bunny Mellon was very good to the island’s causes,” Agnes Meeker, a sixth-generation Antiguan of Scottish ancestry, told me. “She helped me with the St. John’s Hospice. Also she was a good friend of Jackie Kennedy and often had her at Mill Reef with the children for Christmas.” Indeed. When photographers tried to take pictures of Mrs. Kennedy on a Mill Reef beach, they were arrested and deported.

As Mr. T rose from our table to return to his office, I asked him about his future. He was ready to retire and sell his hotel, he said, but he would not budge from the oceanfront apartment at the Siboney where he has lived since 1984.

While he strolled away, a loud crowd was packing the Coconut Grove, the restaurant and bar next to the hotel, to catch that day’s World Cup matches. It was early in the afternoon, but the place was already busy with people huddling around the bar and drinking up: expats, tourists, locals, whites, blacks, men, women, Italians, Canadians, Americans, Britons, Aussies. Johnny, the manager, a sunburned Dane in his 40s with a shaved head, stubble and rugged looks, kept an eye out for customers. His girlfriend, Emma, a Brit who called herself a “beach girl,” was holding court nearby, and the bartender, Jermaine, a 30-something Antiguan, was greeting everyone with his standard “How are you, my friend?” He slid a glass of sauvignon blanc across the bar counter toward me. I squeezed my way in and climbed onto a stool to join the fray. It was a small world, a small place, but it was for everyone. It was Antigua whole.

IMAGES: Left: View from Galley Bay Resort & Spa, a place to explore the glamorous side of Antigua. Top right: a windmill at Betty’s Hope, a former sugar plantation. Bottom right: English Harbour, a base for the British Navy in the 18th century. Credit Sasha Maslov for The New York Times

Exploring Betty’s Hope, left, and the archaeologist Reginald Murphy, right, at the former sugar plantation. Credit Sasha Maslov for The New York Times

Shirley Heights Lookout, the top of a hill above English Harbour. Credit Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

Waves crash at Devil’s Bridge on Antigua. Credit Sasha Maslov for The New York Times

Grilling corn along a road. Credit Sasha Maslov for The New York Times

For more on this story go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/travel/seeing-the-whole-of-antigua.html?_r=0