During my two weeks on Grenada, I'd heard locals speak with disappointment, resignation, and suspicion about all of the development taking place. A businesswoman in her thirties who has lived on the island all of her life told me, "Grenada is courting developers like a junkie who needs a fix. These projects are pushing locals out of the coastal areas where they keep their boats and where we have gathered for generations." More than one said they were mourning the loss of a Grenada their children or grandchildren will never know.

At last count, there were eight major hotel and residential development projects under way, and the number of available hotel rooms is set to double to three thousand over the next two years (by comparison, Barbados, which is roughly the same size, has six thousand rooms). Among them is a 360-acre hotel and villa complex that recently broke ground adjacent to Levera National Park, a fragile sea turtle nesting area in the north, and a forty-one-acre resort and villa project going up on the southeast coast.

Nobody has wagered more on Grenada becoming the next Caribbean destination for the rich and fabulous than Peter de Savary, and certainly nobody is doing more to make sure that it happens. An Englishman who made his first fortune in oil and shipping, De Savary has spent the past thirty years developing hotels and private clubs in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Caribbean that cater primarily to an international crowd of celebrities and other extremely moneyed sorts. His latest, and perhaps largest, undertaking is transforming Grenada's port, around which the capital is arrayed, into what he describes, depending on the day, as the Amalfi Coast or the St-Tropez or the Portofino of the Caribbean.

De Savary's first trip to Grenada was on a family vacation when he was seven years old. His family stayed at the Islander Hotel, set on a headland overlooking the port and St. George's. The Islander is gone now, bombed out during the brief U.S. intervention that followed a Marxist coup in 1983; in its place, De Savary is building thirty multi-million-dollar residential villas. He's cleaned up the lagoon, which had been filled with scrap for years, and is covering the hillside with apartments that will cascade down to a 150-room hotel on three acres of reclaimed land. But that's just the beginning of his $500 million project, dubbed Port Louis, which also includes a "maritime village" with more residential development, a second hotel, shops, and a marina that will accommodate some two dozen mega-yachts and three hundred smaller boats. Down at the end of Grand Anse Beach, he's just opened the very nice Mount Cinnamon resort, with seven suites and fourteen villas (and more to come), and he has purchased two former plantations, both spectacularly situated high in the island's interior. One of the latter is for his personal use; the other he is turning into a small inn and spa.

The transformation of Grenada's port from a place that was open to all into one that will be open to all who can afford it has raised hackles in the community, as did the relocation of about eighty families who had lived illegally on the land, some for more than twenty years.