An Island Tale
Thatch Caye began, improbably enough, with a single mangrove seed.
A few thousand years ago, it floated through the Caribbean just inside the Belize Barrier Reef until it snagged on a shallow, seagrass-covered sandbar. It put down roots. Those roots trapped sediment. Other mangroves followed. And, grain by grain, an island began to emerge. Fast forward to the early 1960s, and that single mangrove had grown into a long, narrow island over two miles long.
In 1961, Hurricane Hattie came along and reversed several thousand years of natural development in a single day, splitting what was then known as Coco Plum Caye into three separate sections. The northern part of that island is what we know today as Thatch Caye.
But creating Thatch Caye from a skinny mangrove swamp took vision and years of hard work. On New Year’s Eve in 2001, an enterprising pair of American businessmen visited the little sand spit and saw something no one else had ever dared imagine. If they could hold back the sea and trap enough sand, they could create something special.
Thus began a seven-year project to build an island. A team of eight moved in and lived in tents while they slowly expanded and raised the ground. For weeks and months on end, they filled plastic kayaks with sand from the seafloor and dumped it behind makeshift seawalls. Bit by bit, the island grew from about twenty feet wide to well over one hundred. In later years, structures began to go up.
The team learned a lot about erosion, construction, and the shifting nature of wet sand. The sloping floor of the Coco Lounge is a living testament to one of those lessons. Yet, years of hard work finally paid off, and the newly christened Thatch Caye received its first guests for Christmas 2008.
In that first incarnation, the island was a living zoo, with animals from all over Belize roaming free. It didn’t take too long to figure out that this was a bad idea. A few people were freaked out by having a coatimundi follow them into their bungalows, and the howler monkeys' unpredictable early-morning alarms were not to everyone’s liking.
The resort changed hands about five years later, and the little island attracted a fan base that loved the hospitality, the barefoot casual environment, and the proximity to the barrier reef.
In April of 2013, I stopped by with some friends on a diving trip, spending the night anchored off the west side on a catamaran and enjoying a few rum cocktails in the Starfish Bar. Little did I know that less than two years later it would become a core part of the Muy’Ono Resorts portfolio.
The second transformation that followed created the Thatch Caye we know today. Keeping the island above the rising Caribbean is a constant negotiation with nature. The sea is always trying to reclaim what mangroves and humans built.
But at sunset after a day of adventure, with a cold drink in hand and the reef stretching toward the horizon, it is worth remembering that this entire place began with one small seed that happened to stop drifting and found a home.
Come down, and maybe you’ll find yours as well.
