Mantis St Helena Hotel: heritage luxury on St Helena, isolated island in the Atlantic Ocean
- Housed in the former East India Company offices, the hotel has raised the bar for accommodation on the remote isle
- Once accessible only by boat, the island can now be flown to direct from South Africa, weather permitting
St Helena, way out in the South Atlantic? Can you get there without spending a week on a ship? Well, not right now, no. But in non-pandemic times, it’s six hours in a plane from Johannesburg, South Africa, and 4½ hours back. The plane refuels in Namibia on the outbound flight, just in case the weather is bad over St Helena and it has to return to the coast.
Where would the discerning visitor stay? In the most upmarket hotel, although admittedly there’s not much competition. There are only about 100 guest rooms on the island, and 30 of those are at the Mantis St Helena, which opened just as commercial flights began to arrive, in 2017.
The hotel is a conversion of 18th century former East India Company offices in an elegant terrace on Main Street, a line of Georgian buildings leading up from the harbour in the capital, Jamestown (far right). The rooms are solidly furnished with large en-suite bathrooms and ceilings high enough to be almost out of sight, which is how everybody kept cool before the invention of air conditioning.
Wait, there’s no air conditioning? There is now, both in the eight heritage rooms and those in a smart new extension at the rear. But rugged, leafy St Helena is no torrid palm-fringed beach resort island, and has temperate weather year-round. The Mantis also has television, free internet access and a full-service restaurant, not all of which are easy to find on this small, isolated island.
More importantly, the hotel is right in the centre of tiny Jamestown, in walking distance of ancient fortifications, the harbour, museum, market, the oldest Anglican church in the southern hemisphere, and just about everything else.
A 699-step single-flight staircase known as Jacob’s Ladder soars up the cliffside to Ladder Hill Fort from just behind the hotel and can be seen lit up at night from rooms at the rear. It’s almost compulsory to climb up for views of the narrow, steep-sided valley into which the city is squeezed.