What is important about the clarity is that it allows for one of the most extensive barrier reefs in the world, which stretches sixty-five miles across and two hundred miles long: The lack of murk in the water lets the sunlight filter down to the symbiotic algae that coral need to survive. And where there is coral, still relatively healthy, there is sea life—so wide a profusion of delightfully colored parrot fish and angelfish, spiny lobsters, silvery schools rocking in the currents, eagle rays, and little blennies poking in and out of their tiny abodes that divers flock from all over the world to see them.

There are even sea turtles, one of which graced me with its company as I snorkeled alone one day. Turtles move through the water as birds move through the sky, only more slowly, and being with one was stirring.

ninety-nine acres of an eighteen-thousand-acre private reserve on the otherwise uninhabited northwest coast ... Aman agreed to preserve the natural terrain, landscape only with native species, and build in as unobtrusive and environmentally thoughtful a fashion as possible

Each room is a private pavilion set deeply into the vegetation ... you can't see anyone, which means no one can see you.

Staff must be familiar with who is who, and magically, within hours of our arrival, everyone ... seemed to know our names and the names of our children, whom they joked with and doted on with genuine kindness ... Amanyara keeps no hours - everything is available always - and the kitchen, which employs chefs from Indonesia, Thailand, Italy, Macedonia, Switzerland, and Morocco, is prepared to cook anything within the scope of human craving. Menus are deliberately small, because it is not expected that anyone will order from them.

general manager tells me that if, as recently happened, someone complains of a smell coming from a concrete wall, the engineers will blast down the wall to find the source ... "A fruit basket," the general manager says ... "has never once made anything better for anyone."

trees. Here they are mahogany, flown in from Florida. Mahogany is native to the Turks and Caicos, but they never grow very large here, and Jean-Michel Gatthy ... wanted large ones for Amanyara's enormous reflecting pool, around which the reception, restaurant, bar, and library pavilions are gathered. Their beauty is marred, however, by the rough wooden crutches nailed to them, four or six to each tree ... resort has had to adjust to being pounded by hurricanes: Irene alone took out sixty-five trees in 2011. The water table rose so high that the floor of the reflecting pool, which is simply rubber matting laid over dirt, began to undulate. The Miami mahoganies were vulnerable in such conditions.

Every day, the team of twenty gardeners in green shirtsleeves are out with their hedge-cutters, carrying out their Sisyphean work of pruning back exuberant nature. When I ask the general manager about this, he points to the gently undulating vegetation that provides a bottom frame for the view of the sea, and explains that even that seemingly careless line is perfectly calculated: shoulder-height here, hip-height there, and so on, in the instructional code of the office of Jean-Michel Gatthy. The buildings are made up of three kinds of teak, all from Indonesia. In order to keep them in pristine condition, the hotel has to close for a month of renovation every year. Last year, $225,000 was spent on the annual restoration of the four main pavilions alone