If you’ve been reading along for a while, you may remember me mentioning Little Palm Island. I’ve referenced it more than once as one of those places that belongs to its location in a way few resorts do — small, intimate, adults only, accessible only by boat, with no televisions, no phones in the rooms, and a culture around stillness that guests tend to enforce on themselves.

I’ve been wanting to write about it properly for months. The reason I’m doing it now is that we just returned from our first visit since 2015.

A lot happened in those eleven years. Hurricane Irma devastated the island in 2017. The rebuild took years, and the resort reopened in 2020 — just in time for the world to shut down. Life kept us busy and the timing never quite aligned. But I’ve wanted to get back ever since, and this spring we finally did.

I’m glad we went. Here’s what we found.

The trip to Little Palm Island starts before you arrive.

It starts at Wahoo’s Bar & Grill in Islamorada, about an hour up the road from the Shore Station. They make a blackened grouper sandwich that I’ve thought about often in the years since we last went. Every time we stop there it’s better than I remember.

Then you drive south to the Little Palm Island Shore Station at Mile Marker 28.5, leave your car, and wait for the boat. The reception area has been reimagined since the rebuild. Smaller and more refined, with a beautiful outdoor area where a Gumby Slumber cocktail is offered almost immediately. The boat comes, the crossing is short, and by the time you step off the dock at Little Palm Island, whatever you were carrying when you left home feels a little lighter.

We’ve been here before, but eleven years is a long time, and this felt less like a return and more like a reunion.

The island is five acres, accessible only by boat or seaplane, and it holds 30 bungalows. That’s it. There are no televisions, no phones that reach off-island in the rooms, and signs posted around the resort that read: Cell Phone Use Prohibited in Public Spaces. 

They didn’t remind us of this at check-in. They didn’t need to. Most people who book Little Palm already know what they’re coming for.

The island has changed since the rebuild in some meaningful ways. The perimeter path of crushed shells, a gentle loop where you could walk and watch the water, is gone now. More private space between the bungalows and the shoreline has replaced it. I missed the old path, but the privacy it creates is real, and the tradeoff makes sense for what this place offers.

The pool area has been upgraded significantly. Four elegant cabanas line one side now, with umbrella beach loungers across the pool and on the beach. All of the loungers, including the cabanas, are first come, first served. We claimed ours just after breakfast each morning and essentially lived there, five to seven hours a day, reading, dozing, slipping into the pool when the sun got a little too warm.

I finished three books. We never left the island.

We talked about taking the boat to Looe Key for snorkeling one afternoon. We ultimately decided not to go, because we didn’t want to give up an afternoon reading by the pool. The island had done its work. Neither of us wanted to be anywhere else.

Dinner at Little Palm is beach dining in the truest sense. White tablecloths in the sand, string lights strung between the palms, the water dark and calm just beyond the tables. The menu changes every evening and every single thing we ate was extraordinary. This is not resort food. This is a kitchen that takes itself seriously, in a setting that shouldn’t work but absolutely does.

One evening, somewhere into my black grouper, a local fish accompanied with celery root purée, a citrus salad, blood orange vinaigrette and mint, I noticed my mind had gone quiet. Not tired-quiet. Actually quiet. No mental lists, no anticipation of what’s next, no low hum of things unfinished. Just the meal in front of me, Greg across the table, the sound of the water, the last of the sunset behind the palms. It was the feeling I’d been hoping for when I booked the trip. I didn’t expect it to arrive so cleanly, or so soon.

That’s what Little Palm is designed to do. And every bit of it delivered.

A few things worth knowing if you’re considering it:

Late April and early May are ideal. Warm enough to be in the pool comfortably, without the intensity of summer heat. The weather was perfect for every hour we were there. It’s also shoulder season, so it’s a bit more price friendly than high season from January to March.

The island is adults only and genuinely intimate. With only 30 bungalows and no day visitors, you recognize faces by the second day.

The Wahoo’s stop is non-negotiable. Build it into the itinerary.

And if you talk yourself out of the snorkeling excursion because you simply don’t want to leave the island, that’s not a failure of planning. That’s the place working exactly as it should.