The Most Exotic Caribbean Islands To Spend the Holidays

To enjoy Christmas and New Year's, the Caribbean offers a plethora of extraordinary destinations that celebrate the season with lively parades, music festivals, gastronomy, and exceptional beaches. These are some of the most recommended places to spend the holidays and welcome 2023 with memorable experiences for the family or on a couple's's trip.

Belize

This destination in Central America celebrates Christmas and New Year's festivities throughout the month of December and the first week of January. In addition to impressive jungles, scuba diving, and snorkeling sites, visitors enjoy street parties with traditional Mayan music, such as the famous Deer Dance held in the Santa Cruz area until Christmas Day.

Belize is a charming destination with mainly rustic accommodations that offers memorable adventures for visitors in extraordinary sites such as incredible coral reef and jungles that include a vast network of reserves and national parks as well as archeological sites of great historical and cultural heritage. In this fantastic destination, snorkelers are assisted by local experts who help them explore hard and soft corals, sponges, and more than 500 species of fishes.

There are hundreds of diving sites of different depths where visitors can see, among other species, various types of turtles, barracudas, and, with some luck, even sharks.

Montserrat

The Irish heritage of this Caribbean island makes the celebration of Christmas very important to the residents, who hold a traditional annual festival from mid-December to the first week of January. Carnival parties include a Soca Monarch competition (traditional music), the Night of Pan party, the pageant queen coronation, calypso contests, and a lavish parade held on New Year's Day.

While Montserrat celebrates the Christmas and New Year holidays with great energy, it is a perfect destination to relax. Its scarce hotel infrastructure makes it a cozy place where visitors enjoy extraordinary nature, due to the large volcanoes that surround it, and fabulous beaches such as Rendezvous, Woodlands, and Lime Kiln, a fabulous spot for snorkeling and scuba diving.

Visitors can also enjoy the lush jungles with bike rides or hiking on trails that cross banana plantations and from where tourists can enjoy an extraordinary view of the island.

Cozumel

This small island located on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, is ideal for families and couples to enjoy a memorable Christmas and New Year's Eve. The tradition in Mexico, is to celebrate with nine days of festivities, called Posadas, which precede Christmas, and in which children enjoy typical customs such as adorning a branch and singing from house to house to announce the arrival of Jesus.

To all this, Cozumel adds a wide variety of activities to enjoy in the Mexican Caribbean with extraordinary sites for snorkeling and scuba diving in the world's second-most significant coral reef barrier in the world. The island offers assistance services for beginner and advanced divers with PADI-accredited experts who take tourists to the Cozumel National Park Reefs.

For those who prefer to snorkel, Cozumel has countless sites inhabited by a lot of underwater life as well as breathtaking caves and ledges where visitors can see barracudas, rays, sharks and various other species.

For visitors looking for places to relax, Cozumel features Playa Bonita, east of the island.

St. Kitts and Nevis

In this fabulous Caribbean destination, Christmas is a special holiday celebrated with fun activities that start on Boxing Day (December 26th), including street parties, cultural performances, and music contests that extend until January 1 when the traditional New Year's parade is held.

St. Kitts offers its visitors incredible coral reefs to enjoy snorkeling and scuba diving. One of the most spectacular is the cove near Frigate Bay, an area of incredible coral and underwater life. Another spot is Half Moon Bay, located on the Atlantic side of the island, which offers an extraordinary view surrounded by a lush mountain scenery and ideal sites for other water sports, such as yachting, swimming and sport fishing.

In the south of the island you'll find Cockleshell Beach, another of the most popular spots for the large number of restaurants it has and the festive atmosphere that tourists enjoy in the Christmas and New Year seasons. Also for snorkeling, South Friars Beach offers excellent conditions, plus fine dining restaurants to celebrate with menus featuring a variety of fresh seafood and healthy dishes.

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