Why is it that everyone is so eager to tell you how beautiful St. Barths is ?

In exclusively natural terms it isn't very beautiful at all.

Compared to the green sloping plains of St. Kitts, or the lush river valleys of Martinique, it is scrawny, parched, and inhospitable.

   There is, of course, an explanation:

   St. Barths is beautiful because of the ingenious alliance between the place that Nature made, and the place that men and women have made within it.

   It's more of a feeling than a catalog of sights, sounds, and smells. Some corner of our minds recognizes that a people have evolved a way of life, adapted to difficult circumstances, that has resulted in things like charm, pride, peace, and, more recently, plenty.