Virgin Islands (St John)

Declared in 1956, Virgin Islands National Park covers close to 60% of the island of St John thanks to a massive gift of land made that same year by Laurance Rockefeller, grandson of the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, who had bought much of the island in the 1950s with the express intention of preserving it from mass tourist development before handing it to the United States federal government. Its white sand beaches, among them the celebrated Trunk Bay with its marked underwater snorkelling trail, are routinely counted among the most photographed in the Caribbean.