Anguilla 6 Day Itinerary (No Tourist Traps)

Anguilla runs on the East Caribbean dollar, pegged at EC$2.70 to the US dollar since 1976, but nearly every price a visitor actually sees is quoted straight in USD, and it runs higher than the peg alone would suggest. This is a British Overseas Territory, its own jurisdiction, not a satellite of St Martin/Sint Maarten next door, even though almost everyone flies into Sint Maarten first and ferries across. Six days covers the full spine of beaches and cays a 33-beach island genuinely has, plus one day that isn’t about Anguilla at all: a Sint Maarten ferry day, because by day 6 the checklist has run dry.

This builds on the 5-day itinerary with one extra day tacked on for the ferry over to Sint Maarten; everything in the 4-day , 3-day , and 2-day routes still holds underneath it. Only got a week? The 7-day itinerary adds a second unstructured day rather than manufacturing more Anguilla sights.

Book these before you go:

Day Focus Travel time Rough daily cost (USD)
1 Arrival via SXM and ferry, Meads Bay settle-in, Shoal Bay East 20-25 min ferry, Blowing Point to Marigot 100-180
2 Rendezvous Bay, Sunshine Shack, the Dune Preserve, a Maundays Bay drive-by Short taxi or rental car, West End 80-150
3 First cay day: Sandy Island or Prickly Pear, The Valley, Heritage Collection Museum 5-15 min boat from Sandy Ground 110-190
4 Scilly Cay lobster lunch, island loop by rental car, Little Bay snorkel About 45 min for the whole loop 120-200
5 Unstructured repeat beach day, your call which one None, you’re staying put 60-130
6 Sint Maarten day trip: shopping, casinos, livelier dining 20-25 min ferry each way, plus a taxi between Marigot and Philipsburg 90-180

Day 1: Get In, Get to Meads Bay, Do Nothing Ambitious

Most visitors don’t fly into Anguilla directly. Land at Princess Juliana International (SXM) on Sint Maarten, then take the public ferry from Marigot to Blowing Point, about 20-25 minutes, roughly eight sailings a day, a one-way adult fare around $30 plus a separate departure tax that varies enough by category that it’s worth confirming the current figure at gov.ai rather than trusting an old blog post. American Airlines flies Miami direct into Anguilla’s own Clayton J. Lloyd Airport (AXA); check the current weekly frequency at aa.com before you build a schedule around it, since sources on how often that flight actually runs genuinely conflict. Settle into a Meads Bay or Sandy Ground base, then spend what’s left of the day at Shoal Bay East, a real two-mile run of the kind of sand that keeps landing on “world’s best beach” lists, with a reef close enough to snorkel straight off it.

Day 2: Rendezvous Bay, Two Beach Bars, and a Maundays Bay Drive-By

Rendezvous Bay is the quieter answer to Shoal Bay East, a long west-facing beach with a clear sightline across the channel to St Martin, plus two of the island’s best-known beach bars: Sunshine Shack and Bankie Banx’s Dune Preserve, home of the Moonsplash festival most years around March. Drive or taxi past Maundays Bay on the far west end while you’re out there; it’s one of the prettiest curves of sand on the island, but in practice it functions as the Cap Juluca resort’s private beach, so treat it as a look rather than a beach day unless you’re staying there or booked for a meal. Close the day at Sandy Ground, the harbor town with the island’s real concentration of casual restaurants and the closest thing Anguilla has to a nightlife strip.

Day 3: The First Cay Day, Plus The Valley

Book a short boat out of Sandy Ground to Sandy Island, about five minutes across, a genuinely tiny sandbar with an on-site restaurant, loungers, and a resident masseuse, or to Prickly Pear, where Agatha’s (running 20-plus years) and Johnno’s are the two beach restaurants worth choosing between, with better snorkeling than anything directly off Shoal Bay. Either cay beats a straight fourth beach day: the boat ride and the food are real differentiators a repeat stretch of sand can’t offer. If daylight allows, swing through The Valley, Anguilla’s low-key capital, for Wallblake House, a restored 1787 plantation great house, and the Heritage Collection Museum, which covers the island’s history from the pre-Columbian period through the 1967 revolution against rule from St Kitts. Call ahead for both the museum’s hours and admission; neither is consistently published anywhere.

Day 4: Scilly Cay’s Lobster, an Island Loop by Car, Little Bay

Scilly Cay, off Island Harbour on the east end, runs on a system that trips up anyone expecting a normal restaurant: you wave from the pier and a dinghy motors over to collect you, no reservation, no app. The draw is grilled lobster and crayfish with a heavy rum punch chaser, but it’s historically open only a few specific days a week for lunch, commonly cited as Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday; confirm before you plan a day around it, and don’t trust the venue’s own website for current hours, its domain currently resolves to a parked page. Pair the lunch with a full island loop by rental car (get the temporary Anguilla driving permit from the rental company first, roughly $25 for three months or $15 for three days, and remember driving is on the left), a loop that runs about 45 minutes end to end and takes in Maundays Bay and the East End along the way. Little Bay, a secluded north-coast cove reachable by boat or a rope-assisted scramble down the cliffside, is worth adding if you’ve got energy left; check locally that the rope’s still in good shape before you rely on it.

Day 5: The Day With Nothing New On It

This is the day most 6-day Anguilla itineraries fake a new activity to fill. Don’t. Go back to whichever beach from days 1 through 4 pulled at you hardest, Shoal Bay East for the reef, Rendezvous Bay for the quiet, and stay there. The honest case for a fifth day on an island this size was never more checklist, it’s pace: a slower morning, a repeat lunch at a beach bar you already liked, no new sight because the island doesn’t have enough distinct ones left to show you. That’s also the reason day 6 leaves Anguilla entirely instead of inventing a fifth beach.

Day 6: The Day That Isn’t About Anguilla At All

Take the ferry back over to Sint Maarten, but treat it as a genuine change of pace rather than a rerun of your arrival day. The public ferry lands at Marigot, on the French side, good for boutique shopping and a proper French-Caribbean lunch in Grand Case; the Dutch side, Philipsburg, is a short taxi away and has the casinos, the cruise-ship boardwalk, and a noticeably livelier restaurant and nightlife scene, neither of which Anguilla has by design. There’s no border checkpoint between the French and Dutch sides, so combining both halves in one day is a straightforward taxi hop, not a second immigration queue. This day works precisely because it’s nothing like the rest of the trip: casinos, cruise crowds, and duty-free shopping are the opposite of what brought you to Anguilla in the first place, which is exactly the point of a day 6 this far into a slow island.

Is a Sint Maarten Day Trip Worth Giving Up a Beach Day?

Yes, specifically on a 6-day-or-longer trip. Anguilla’s own beaches and cays are genuinely better than anything Sint Maarten offers for sand and snorkeling, so this isn’t an upgrade, it’s a deliberate change of pace: shopping, casinos, and a livelier restaurant scene that Anguilla doesn’t have by policy. On a 2 or 3-day trip it’s a real trade-off against beach time; by day 6, the island has already delivered its headline sights, so the day trip costs you nothing you hadn’t already covered.

Is Anguilla Part of St Martin or Sint Maarten?

No, and it’s a common mix-up given you’ll almost certainly fly into St Martin/Sint Maarten’s airport to get here. Anguilla is its own British Overseas Territory, a separate jurisdiction from the split French/Dutch island 12 miles south, run under its own House of Assembly and Chief Minister with a UK-appointed Governor retaining defense and policing. St Martin is a transit point and, on a longer trip like this one, a deliberate day-trip change of pace, not part of Anguilla itself.

Is Anguilla Safe to Visit Right Now?

Mostly, with one caveat worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s current advisory flags a documented 2025 spike in serious gang-related gun crime and robbery, corroborated by a community anti-gun-violence march held on the island in August 2025, alongside the standard advice to avoid isolated areas after dark and keep valuables out of sight. That’s real and current, but violent crime aimed at tourists specifically stays rare. The bigger everyday risks on this itinerary are strong sun, rip currents on the windier north-coast beaches, and underbudgeting for an island that costs more than it looks like it should.

Before You Go

Carry both East Caribbean and US dollars; USD is accepted everywhere and most menus quote it directly, but the actual currency is the EC dollar, not the euro and not a free-floating local unit, so don’t expect a budget island just because the math is easy. Hurricane season runs officially June through November, with August to October carrying the statistically highest storm risk, so travel insurance is a sensible add if your dates fall in that window; Hurricane Irma caused real damage back in 2017, but recovery is long complete and several resorts rebuilt to a higher standard than before. Pack a printed copy of your ferry confirmation and your accommodation’s address for day 1: phone signal drops mid-crossing between Sint Maarten and Blowing Point, and a taxi driver working off a name alone at the terminal wastes ten minutes you don’t need to lose.