Tortola is the hub of the British Virgin Islands. People come for its top notch beaches, banks, customs and the best range of hotels, restaurants and nightclubs. The capital, Road Town, is a little more picturesque than its name suggests. Main St, one street back from the waterfront, is a pretty stretch of brightly painted wooden and brick buildings. If you're here waiting for someone to get their hair braided, it's worth flexing out in the peaceful JR O'Neal Botanic Gardens or admiring curios in the small BVI Folk Museum.What really makes Tortola special though are its great bays and beaches. The best spots to lay down your beach towel or don a mask and flippers are on the northwest coast at Cane Garden Bay, Smugglers Cove and Brewers Bay. When you tire of being horizontal, there are fine views of the surrounding islands from the Sage Mountain National Park, though not from the dense scrub at the 1780ft (534m) peak. The North Shore Shell Museum in Carrot Bay is about as cluttered and chaotic as a museum can get; as well as thousands of shells, there are boats and various dibbets of craft crammed in among scores of homilies painted on driftwood.

This half-mountainous, half-flat 'Fat Virgin' with a scrawny neck lies a few miles northeast of Tortola. Though it's home to just 2500 people, it has one of the Caribbean's most amazing sights. The Baths are a surreal collection of gigantic granite boulders strewn across blindingly white palm-lined beaches at the southwestern end of the island. Tide and wave action turns caves into baths and back again, eroding a snorkeler's playground of crevices and pools. It's on the south side of Devil's Bay and is well worth scuba diving when the water is calm.The Baths are one of the most visited spots in the British Virgin Islands, so if you want to escape from the hubbub, head for North Sound, a large protected bay encircled by reef, or Mosquito and Prickly Pear islands off the northern coast. The former has a resort; the latter is a national park. The northern half of Virgin Gorda island is mountainous, dominated by Gorda Peak (1359ft; 408m), while the southeast contains an abandoned copper mine, a reminder of the islands' industrial past.