Icons & Visionaries

35 islands that exist because one person decided they should. The test is stricter than a famous name on the deed: the register asks whether the record also carries what the founder was trying to do. A financier who bought an island is not a visionary; a man who bought one and spent forty years putting the vegetation back is.

Sharpening that test cost the series a third of its members. It previously held forty-nine records, which turned out to mean «had a well-known founder» — a fact about the buyer rather than the island. Requiring a recorded intention brought it to 35, and the ones that left are still in the register, just not under this heading.

The intentions differ more than the wealth does. Mateschitz built a self-sufficient estate on Laucala with a farm that feeds it. Brando held Tetiaroa for forty years insisting on a research station before a hotel. Wilhelmina Wentworth kept Petit St. Vincent low, quiet and deliberately unmodernised through five decades of Caribbean development.

Not for travellers who want the story left at reception. On these islands the founder's decisions are still visible in what you may and may not do — where you can build, what is planted, whether there are televisions — and some of those decisions are inconvenient on purpose.