Holidays in Saint Martin

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Saint Martin

A Border Settled by a Walk, or So the Story Goes

On 23 March 1648, atop a hill now known as Mount Concordia, the French governor Robert de Longvilliers and the Dutch representative Martin Thomas signed the Treaty of Concordia, formally dividing the small Caribbean island of Saint Martin between the Kingdom of France and the Dutch Republic. Both nations had reoccupied the island earlier that year after Spain, which had held it since the 1630s but found it economically worthless, simply abandoned it. Rather than fight over a territory neither had fully secured, the French, arriving from Saint Kitts, and the Dutch, arriving from Saint Eustatius, negotiated instead.

Local legend has long offered a far more colourful account of how the actual boundary line was drawn than the treaty's own sober text records. According to the island's best-known story, a Frenchman and a Dutchman, each provided with drink beforehand, were placed back to back at Oyster Pond on the island's east coast and told to walk in opposite directions along the coastline until they met again; the point where their paths reconnected became the border. The story exists in several competing versions depending on who is telling it: the French account holds that the Dutchman lingered too long enjoying local company, while the Dutch version insists the Frenchman simply cheated by running rather than walking. Whatever actually happened, the French side of the island ended up noticeably larger, and although the exact border shifted some sixteen times through further disputes between 1648 and 1816, it has remained fixed and largely uncontested ever since, one of the oldest continuously observed international borders in the Caribbean.

Ninety-Five Percent in a Single Morning

Early on the morning of 6 September 2017, Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 storm with sustained winds reaching roughly 185 miles per hour, one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever recorded by wind speed, made a direct pass over Saint Martin. By the time the storm moved on, local officials estimated that around ninety-five percent of the island's structures had been damaged or destroyed outright. "95 per cent of the island is destroyed," Daniel Gibbs, chairman of the French side's territorial council, told local radio afterward, adding simply that he was in shock.

The damage cut across the island's 1648 border without regard for which side of it a building happened to stand on: the Dutch side's Princess Juliana International Airport, a major regional transit hub, was left unreachable, while the French capital of Marigot suffered severe structural and infrastructure damage of its own. At least eight people were killed on Saint Martin, part of a wider death toll that reached into the dozens across the Lesser Antilles as the same storm went on to devastate Barbuda and other neighbouring islands before turning toward Florida. French President Emmanuel Macron, describing the destruction as harsh and cruel, mobilised an emergency reconstruction fund within days, marking the beginning of a recovery effort that would extend across the island's French and Dutch sides alike for years afterward.

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