St Thomas Cruise Port Guide

St Thomas Cruise Port: Two Piers, Not One

St Thomas has two cruise piers, they sit on opposite sides of Charlotte Amalie harbour about 4 km apart by road, and which one you get changes your whole day. Havensight — properly the West Indian Company dock, written WICO on most schedules — is the eastern pier. Crown Bay is the western pier, beyond Frenchtown. Between them they hold several large ships alongside.

That word alongside is the correction worth making first. A great deal of writing about St Thomas describes tender tickets and tender queues as if tendering were normal here. It is not. Both piers are alongside berths with a gangway onto concrete, and on the overwhelming majority of calls you simply walk off. Tendering happens only when more ships are booked than the two piers can take: the surplus vessels anchor out in the harbour and run tenders into the downtown Waterfront, which ironically lands you nearer Main Street than Havensight does. Your daily programme the evening before settles it. A berth name means you are walking off. A tender ticket means you are not.

Havensight is the busier and the better placed of the two. The terminal opens straight into Havensight Mall, and the town centre is about 2.4 km, roughly 1.5 miles, away along a flat waterfront pavement, 25 to 30 minutes on foot. A taxi covers it in 6 minutes. Crown Bay is the quieter pier with the newer shopping arcade, but the town centre is 2.4 km away on foot, roughly 30 minutes including a stretch of road with no proper footway, and 8 minutes by taxi.

Charlotte Amalie itself is small — a town of a little over 8,000 people — and the harbour is deep enough to have been a pirate haven long before it was a cruise port. Booking anything time-critical before you sail is the difference between a full day and a wasted one, and the island’s full list of tours and tickets is worth scanning before you leave home.

Walking, Taxis and the 6-Minute Ride Into Town

From Havensight, follow Veterans Drive west along the water. The walk from the pier to the old town is about 2.4 km, roughly 1.5 miles, and takes 25 to 30 minutes door to door. It is flat the whole way and the pavement is continuous. The only real cost is sun exposure, because there is almost no shade on that stretch.

From Crown Bay the walk into town is 2.4 km and takes about 30 minutes, and it is the one most people should skip, because part of the route runs along a working port road. Frenchtown is the better short walk from that pier: it sits about 1.2 km from the Crown Bay gate, between the dock and the town centre, and it is a working neighbourhood rather than a retail strip.

Taxis are the default here and they work differently from almost anywhere else. Fares are not metered. They are set per person and per destination by the VI Taxicab Commission, the vehicles are usually open-sided safari trucks or vans, and drivers routinely combine parties going the same way with separate drop-offs. Agree the total with the driver before you board, including any charge for extra bags, and say how many of you are travelling, because groups from the same party pay a lower per-person rate.

Published taxi times from Havensight: Charlotte Amalie 6 minutes, Coki Point and Coral World 12 minutes, Magens Bay 15 minutes, Mountain Top 17 minutes, Red Hook 17 minutes. From Crown Bay the same destinations take longer because you cross the town first: Charlotte Amalie 8 minutes, Magens Bay 25 minutes, Coki Point 26 minutes, Mountain Top 30 minutes, Red Hook 31 minutes.

There is no Uber and no Lyft on St Thomas — neither company operates in the territory, so do not plan around an app that will not open. VITRAN public buses run, but the network does not reach the whole island and the service is unreliable enough that no one should hang a ship departure on it. If you want a fixed arrangement rather than a queue, booking professional drivers in advance removes the bargaining and the wait at the pier gate.

Start With the Step Streets and Government Hill

If you do one thing on foot, make it the climb up Government Hill behind Main Street. Charlotte Amalie was laid out by the Danes on ground too steep for carts, and their answer was 45 step streets cut into the hillside. The best known is Store Taarne Gade, Great Tower Street, universally called the 99 Steps. From Main Street it is about 150 m to the foot of the staircase, which then climbs in a single flight to the crown of Government Hill. It is a public right of way, so there is no gate and nothing to book.

At the top stands Skytsborg, the stone watchtower the Danes built in 1679 and which everyone calls Blackbeard’s Castle. It was made a National Historic Landmark on 12 October 1994. The tower sits inside the Blackbeard’s Castle complex, which spent years as a private house and then a hotel and is open to visitors, with tours of the grounds, the historic houses and the tower itself. It does not open every day, so check before you climb up expecting to go in. On a closed day you can still walk the step street, stand on Government Hill and photograph the tower from outside.

Do the climb in the first hour ashore, carry water and wear something with grip, because the brick treads are worn smooth and turn slick after rain. There is no shade on the staircase itself.

Coming down the far side brings you past the Danish townhouses of Kongens Gade and back into the shopping grid in about 10 minutes. If you would rather have the history explained as you walk it, guided excursions covering the old town book out fast in the December to April high season.

Fort Christian, the Synagogue and the Skyride

Fort Christian is the obvious first stop and it is not uphill, whatever other guides tell you. It stands on flat ground on the waterfront beside Emancipation Garden, directly behind the downtown Waterfront where tenders land. The Danes built it between 1672 and 1680 and it is the oldest standing structure in the US Virgin Islands. It has served as a town centre, a government building and a jail, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a National Historic Landmark on the same day, 5 May 1977. It closed for ten years of restoration and reopened in 2017 for the centenary of Transfer Day, the 31 March 1917 handover from Denmark to the United States. It now holds the St Thomas Museum.

Emancipation Garden sits immediately alongside, with a copy of the Liberty Bell and a statue of a freed man blowing a conch shell. Frederick Lutheran Church, founded in 1666, is a two-minute walk away, and the town itself was founded that same year as Taphus, Danish for tap house, taking the name Charlotte Amalie in 1691.

Five minutes north on Crystal Gade is the St Thomas Synagogue. The present building dates from 1833, it is the second oldest synagogue in the United States after Touro in Newport, Rhode Island, which was built in 1763, and it became a National Historic Landmark on 25 September 1997.

Back at Havensight, the Paradise Point Skyride lifts you 700 feet above St Thomas harbour from a base station across the road from the WICO pier. The ascent takes under 10 minutes and the final descent runs an hour after the published closing time. One warning that matters: the skyride operates on cruise-ship days and shuts for long stretches of the September and October low season, so in those two months confirm it is running before you plan a morning around it.

Magens Bay, St John and the North Shore

Magens Bay is the island’s headline beach and the facts behind it are better than the marketing. The sand curves for nearly three-quarters of a mile inside a deep natural inlet, which is why the water stays flat when the north shore is rough. Arthur S. Fairchild gave 56 acres of it to the municipality in 1946 on the condition that no hotel, resort or casino could ever be built there, and that covenant still holds — it is why the bay has a tree line instead of a wall of concrete. The semi-autonomous Magens Bay Authority runs it, with lifeguards, showers, parking and rentals, and there is an entrance fee. It is 7.6 km from Havensight, a 15-minute taxi ride over the ridge on Route 35, or 25 minutes from Crown Bay.

The better day trip is St John. Two-thirds of that island is Virgin Islands National Park. The route is a 17-minute taxi from Havensight to Red Hook on the east end, 11 km away, then a 15-minute ferry across Pillsbury Sound to Cruz Bay, running roughly hourly every day with Transportation Services of St John. Inter Island Boat Services also runs a 35-minute crossing from Crown Bay direct to Cruz Bay, but only on limited days, so do not build a plan on it without checking first. The ferry from the downtown Charlotte Amalie waterfront to Cruz Bay runs only in the high season and only a few times a day; it is not the year-round service some guides imply.

Coral World Ocean Park sits at Coki Point, 8.1 km and 12 minutes from Havensight. It opened in 1978, covers five acres, and its Underwater Observatory takes you 20 feet below the surface to look at the reef through glass rather than a mask. The 80,000-gallon Caribbean Reef Encounter is the centrepiece, sea lions arrived in 2007, and the park has been rebuilt three times — after Hugo in 1989, Marilyn in 1995 and Irma and Maria in 2017. Like the skyride, it closes on many low-season days in September and October. Comparing the island-wide tours and beach trips is worth doing before you sail rather than at the pier gate.

Booking Ahead, Hiring a Car, or Just Taking a Taxi

St Thomas is 32 square miles, 83 square kilometres, and rises to 1,555 feet at Crown Mountain, so almost every journey crosses a ridge. That geography is what makes independent travel here work or fail.

Taxis suit most port days. The published times are short, the rates are fixed per person by destination, and drivers will wait or return for you by arrangement. For a beach day at Magens Bay, 15 minutes each way from Havensight, a taxi is the simple answer and needs no planning beyond agreeing the fare.

Hiring a car buys you the north shore, Mountain Top at 17 minutes from Havensight, and the east end in one loop, and a valid US or foreign driving licence is accepted for 90 days. Read the next paragraph before you sign anything, because this is the single most important practical fact about St Thomas and the one most visitors are never told.

The US Virgin Islands drives on the left. It is the only jurisdiction under United States law that does, a rule inherited from 245 years of Danish administration that never changed after 1917. The National Park Service states it plainly for St John and it applies identically on St Thomas. What catches people out is the combination: the roads are left-hand traffic, but almost every car on them is a left-hand-drive American import, so you sit on the left of the vehicle and drive on the left of the road at the same time. Right turns are the ones that go wrong, junctions feel inverted, and your instincts will be wrong for the first half hour whether you normally drive on the left or the right. Roads are narrow, steep and often without a footway, so if you walk any distance, face the oncoming traffic by keeping to the right-hand verge.

Ship excursions solve the driving problem and guarantee the ship waits for you. Independent operators collect from the pier gate, but you carry the risk on timing, which on a 17-minute run to Red Hook is small and on a full-day sail is not.

Eight Things Worth Knowing Before You Dock at St Thomas

First, you are in the United States. The US Virgin Islands is an unincorporated US territory, English is the official language, the currency is the US dollar and the area code is 340. US citizens need no passport to come ashore here and none to fly home. Everyone else needs whatever the United States requires of them, because US immigration rules apply in full.

Second, mobile phones. Because this is US territory, most US mobile plans treat St Thomas as domestic rather than roaming. Passengers from elsewhere should check their tariff, because US territory is billed at US rates, not Caribbean rates.

Third, sunscreen. The US Virgin Islands restricts sunscreens containing oxybenzone, octinoxate and octocrylene. Mineral-based sunscreen is the legal option, so bring one rather than assuming you can buy what you normally use.

Fourth, the ferry myth. There is no public ferry terminal at the Havensight cruise pier and no scheduled Water Island ferry from it. The Water Island boat runs from Crown Bay Marina, the reliable St John ferry runs from Red Hook 11 km away, and the downtown Charlotte Amalie to Cruz Bay service is high season only. Any plan built on walking off the ship and straight onto a ferry at Havensight will fail.

Fifth, check Blackbeard’s Castle before you climb. The 1679 tower is a National Historic Landmark inside a complex that is open to visitors for tours, but not every day; on a closed day you can still see it from the public step street.

Sixth, the low-season closures. Paradise Point Skyride and Coral World both run reduced operations in September and October, when few ships call. Between December and April both run on nearly every ship day.

Seventh, the shopping claim is true but narrow. There are more than 400 shops along Dronningens Gade, which is Main Street, and the territory trades on being called the duty-free capital of the world. The great majority of those shops sell jewellery, watches and liquor. One street back from Dronningens Gade the crowd thins within 50 m.

Eighth, timing. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November, which is exactly when the skyride and Coral World thin out their schedules and when itineraries are most likely to be rerouted.

A Workable St Thomas Port Day, Start to Finish

This assumes a Havensight berth, the more common of the two. If you are at Crown Bay, add 8 minutes by taxi to everything and start from the town rather than walking.

Off the ship early and straight into the old town on foot — about 2.4 km along the waterfront, 25 to 30 minutes, flat all the way. Take the heat while it is still tolerable. Fort Christian first, on the waterfront beside Emancipation Garden, then 150 m to the foot of the 99 Steps and up to Government Hill for the harbour view and the 1679 tower. Come down through Kongens Gade, cut five minutes north to the 1833 synagogue on Crystal Gade, and you have covered the town’s three genuine landmarks in about two hours.

Mid-morning, decide between beach and reef. Magens Bay is a 15-minute taxi from Havensight, 7.6 km over Route 35, with lifeguards, showers and three-quarters of a mile of sheltered sand. Coral World at Coki Point is 12 minutes and 8.1 km, and the 20-foot Underwater Observatory is the part worth the trip. Either one fits into three to four hours including both taxi legs.

If you have a long call of nine hours or more, swap both for St John: 17 minutes by taxi to Red Hook, a 15-minute ferry to Cruz Bay running roughly hourly, then Virgin Islands National Park on the far side. Allow 90 minutes for the return leg and do not leave Cruz Bay on the last sensible ferry — leave on the one before it.

Back at Havensight in the last hour, the Paradise Point Skyride goes 700 feet up in under 10 minutes and is the quickest way to see the whole harbour from above, provided it is running. Otherwise Havensight Mall is at the foot of the gangway, which is exactly why so many passengers never see anything else.

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