St Maarten: Fort History & Dutch-French Cheese Tasting

★★★★★★★★★★ 5.00 (4 reviews)

Free cancellationLikely to sell out

1/6

Duration4h

GroupUp to 6

LanguagesEN

PickupAt your hotel

Two Forts, Two Countries, Two Cheese Traditions on One Small Island

You visit two restored forts on opposite sides of St Maarten, each with a capital city view and a cheese tasting paired to that side's tradition — Dutch on one, French on the other. Your guide handles the history and logistics, homemade snacks arrive between stops, and you skip the work of arranging transport or figuring out which fort matters when. Small groups mean you move at a pace that lets the place actually register.

Step-by-step itinerary

Visit forts and cheese tasting

Visit Fort Amsterdam and view Philipsburg
Dutch cheese and wine tasting
Visit Fort St. Louis and view Marigot
French cheese and wine tasting

The Experience

There's something about standing on a fort that's been there for centuries, looking down at a capital city you didn't know existed an hour ago, that makes you realize how much history got compressed into one small place. St Maarten split itself between two nations — Dutch and French — and the forts are where you actually see that line. Fort Amsterdam sits on the Dutch side with Philipsburg spread out below it, reachable by a short, sloping sand path that's easy enough but real enough that you feel like you've gone somewhere. Your guide walks you through what happened here, who built it, why it mattered, and then you taste Dutch cheese with a view that makes the whole thing stick.

After that comes Fort St. Louis on the French side, accessed by concrete stairs that climb up to Marigot, the French capital, laid out in a different rhythm below you — narrower streets, different light, a whole other country's worth of architecture from the same vantage point. The cheese changes too. French varieties, different producers, and you start to taste the actual difference between how two sides of one island do things. In between the forts and the tastings, your guide brings homemade banana bread and lemongrass iced tea — the kind of thing that doesn't sound like much until you're eating it on a fort wall in the Caribbean and realizing nobody else on your tour is rushing anywhere.

The group stays small, which means you're not herding through history with thirty other people. Your guide knows the stories — the real ones, not the polished version — and the cheese tastings aren't a rush. You get time to actually taste, to ask why one cheddar tastes different from another, to understand what you're eating instead of just consuming it. The whole thing runs through the morning, so you're done by early afternoon and the heat hasn't yet turned the island into a furnace.

What’s included

Your day includes visits to Fort Amsterdam and Fort St. Louis with a local guide, Dutch cheese and wine tasting on the Dutch side, French cheese and wine tasting on the French side, homemade banana bread, homemade iced lemongrass tea, and water throughout the tour.

Good to know

Easy physical levelInfant seats availablePets welcome

Operated by Seagrape Tours

Is this one for you?Book this if you want to see both sides of St Maarten's split history without figuring out transport or timing yourself between two forts — the guide handles the route and the story, and the cheese tastings turn the views into something you actually taste and remember.