Travel guide
Featured on October 14, 2026
Jacob's Ladder climbs 699 steps straight out of Jamestown.
Places
You come for the valley-town itself: Main Street's Georgian facades, the Museum of Saint Helena, the harbour, and Jacob's Ladder rearing up the cliff. It is the quickest way to understand how this island worked as a fortified stop in the age of sail.
Tip: Give it half a day; climb Jacob's Ladder early, then walk Main Street once the valley has some shade.
These plain rooms, rather than any grandeur, make Napoleon's exile real. The furniture, garden and wind-scoured setting show how a fallen emperor lived when the world had been reduced to one damp upland house.
Tip: Give it a morning and check opening days ahead; the French domains keep their own hours.
The ridge walk takes you through tree ferns, cabbage trees and cloud so thick the dry coast can feel a world away. This is the island's native high ground, where the scale tightens and every view depends on the weather lifting for a minute.
Tip: Start early; cloud often closes in later and the paths stay slick after rain.
The governor's residence sits in open pasture, and Jonathan the giant tortoise often steals the scene on the lawn. The contrast between colonial ritual and a very old reptile ambling past is pure Saint Helena.
Tip: Check tour times before you go; house visits are limited and sometimes need advance booking.
The road drops into a raw volcanic landscape of red rock, breakers, and the offshore stacks called Lot and Lot's Wife. You go to see how harsh and exposed the island feels once the tidy upland houses thin out.
Tip: Worth a half day; go with a confident driver if steep roads are not your thing.
Eat
A one-pot rice dish cooked with curry spices, meat, potatoes and chopped vegetables until the rice has taken on all the stock.
Where: At family Sunday lunches and on guesthouse buffets.
Flaked tuna or wahoo is mixed with mashed potato, onion and herbs, then fried into crisp rounds.
Where: From Jamestown takeaway counters at lunch, and at home when the boats have landed.
Pastry filled with curried vegetables or minced meat, baked or fried as a hand-held snack.
Where: From small bakeries, school fêtes and island takeaways.
Dense baked bars of coconut, sugar and flour, cut into rectangles for tea.
Where: With afternoon tea in cafés and on office tables.
Story
Jamestown feels like a town folded between cliffs, with schoolchildren, church bells and the harbour sharing one narrow strip of shade. Up on the heights the smell changes from salt and diesel to wet fern and timber in the cloud at Diana's Peak. Then you stand at Longwood, where Napoleon spent his last evenings, and the Atlantic stops feeling romantic and starts feeling absolute.
João da Nova's sailors found an uninhabited island in 1502 and used it for water, wood and rest. In 1659 Captain John Dutton of the East India Company began the fort in James Valley that grew into Jamestown. Enslaved Africans, Company soldiers and later Chinese labourers made a society in a place with no original population. The accent, food and surnames still sound like ships arriving from several directions.
Napoleon Bonaparte's exile from 1815 to 1821 made the island famous, but fame was not the real turning point. In 1869 the Suez Canal opened and the old sailing route to Asia began to empty out. Jamestown lost the steady passing trade that had made it useful, and more islanders began leaving for work elsewhere. By 1900 Boer prisoners were being marched into camps at Deadwood and Broadbottom: no longer a stop every captain needed, the island had become a place empire used for seclusion.
For generations the quay set the calendar. In 2016 the Royal Mail Ship St Helena made her last regular run, and people lined the wharf to watch the departure. The airport opened the same year, though strong wind delayed the first scheduled commercial service until 2017. Today walkers, divers and returnees arrive in hours, but Jamestown still lives at the scale of greetings, family names and whether the ridge is in cloud.
Say hello
Where you to?
Where are you headed?
Say: wair yoo too
What for?
Why?
Say: wot faw
See you now now.
See you later.
Say: see yoo now now
Up country
In the island interior, up on the heights away from Jamestown.
Say: up kun-tree
Who your people?
Which family are you from?
Say: hoo yaw pee-p'l
Surprises
St Helena ebony was thought extinct until two living plants were found in 1980. The species survives now because conservationists propagated those last known trees.
Before he became Astronomer Royal, Edmond Halley spent more than a year on St Helena charting the southern sky. His work there produced one of the earliest major English catalogues of southern stars.
Longwood House and Napoleon's Tomb are French government property. They sit inside a British Overseas Territory, but the sites themselves have been in French hands since the nineteenth century.
Quiz
Which two island groups share the same British Overseas Territory as Saint Helena?
Since 2009 the full territory has been called Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha. The islands are far apart in the South Atlantic, but they share one constitutional link and one governor based on Saint Helena.
3 days
Day 1
Morning on Main Street and at the Museum of Saint Helena; climb Jacob's Ladder before lunch; afternoon at Plantation House; evening back by the harbour in Jamestown.
Day 2
Morning at Longwood House and Napoleon's Tomb; afternoon at the Millennium Forest and across Deadwood Plain; late drive back through Alarm Forest.
Day 3
Early hike in Diana's Peak National Park from the Cabbage Tree Road side; lunch back in Jamestown; mid-afternoon drive over White Gate to Sandy Bay for the Lot and Lot's Wife viewpoints and the beach; return before dark.
At a glance
At a glance
Neighbouring countries
It has no land borders.
Read more
Listen
The song of the day
Massa Dear
Big Easy
It is one of the island's old singalongs, the sort of tune that turns a social evening into a full-room chorus.
Before you go, watch or read
The Emperor's Last Island: A Journey to St Helena
Book
Julia Blackburn makes the island's exile story feel like rooms, weather, servants, gossip and boredom rather than grand legend.
From the community
🇸🇭 Today's country is St. Helena. Jacob's Ladder climbs 699 steps straight out of Jamestown. Jamestown feels like a town folded between cliffs, with schoolchildren, church bells and the harbour sharing one narrow strip of shade. Up on the heights the smell changes from salt and diesel to wet fern and timber in the cloud at Diana's Peak. Then you stand at Longwood, where Napoleon spent his last evenings, and the Atlantic stops feeling romantic and starts feeling absolute. 📍 Places to…
Questions
Travel guide
See who has been there and what you need to travel.