This is by far one of the better places to eat out on St Helena for an evening meal, the choice is amazing and service is five star. The location is out of town but you are rewarded by the excellent food choices and great atmosphere

You will experience local food at its best!

At the blue lantern you do not get fancy decor but you do get a good meal in friendly company, The dining room is of a basic layout more akin to a cafe or a canteen but do not let this put you off, the food and the service is great and at sensible prices.

Seafood, Bar

Nice place to meet fellow travellers have a snack or a beer followed up by a nice meal, simple but friendly atmosphere. Wonderful fresh fish, daily menu and great atmosphere beneath the flags. One of the few places you can just turn up and choose your meal from the dishes cooked fresh daily.  

Cosy · Casual · Good for groups

The Sandwich Bar is a small friendly locally run cafe and always has something different, and offers the best sandwiches on the island. If you fancy a coffee and a snack, or a full English breakfast at a very reasonable price, then this is the place to come. They also offer a takeaway service too.

The food is always good. It's on the more expensive side compared to other restaurants in St Helena but normal prices for UK and the food is delicious. There's an a la carte menu but you can also have the terrace menu that includes fantastic burgers.

The museum is well laid out and provides a fascinating history of St Helena from the first settlers to the Boer prisoners, shipwrecks and much more.

The longer you are on St Helena the more you'll get drawn into its history, politics and culture. The Museum is then the perfect place to mooch, mull and reflect as it has a whole host of artefacts and displays that celebrate pretty much every conceivable aspect of island life since it was discovered in the early 16th century.

Dive Saint Helena

St Helena is a very special diving destination, with something to offer all types of divers and lots to do in-between dives. Most diving is on the sheltered side of the island, with long shallow (10-20m deep) rocky reefs, very little tide or current (water temperature ranges 18-25 degrees C), masses of different fish, lots of interesting macro life, some great wrecks and the potential to see some of the world’s most amazing large marine animals both above and under water. St Helena is also a wonderful place to learn to dive and/or develop your dive skills further. Dive Saint Helena offers a wide variety of diving experiences and packages for all levels of diving expertise. You could be a beginner, the summer diving enthusiast, or an all-year-round professional.

It's an island so remote that it takes a five-day boat ride from South Africa's Cape Town just to get there. But the voyage to Saint Helena is definitely worth it. This largely unspoilt British territory is home to barely 4,000 people. While some have never lived anywhere else, others come here to work for just a year or two. Once home to Napoleon Bonaparte, Saint Helena is also a favourite destination for tourists wishing to discover history. FRANCE 24 takes you to check it out.

Every third week, a British Royal Mail ship begins its journey from Cape Town to Saint Helena, the remote island in the Atlantic where Napoleon was once in exile. It’s like the end of the world in the middle of the Atlantic. Five days, with a northwesterly course, and only then do the sheer black cliffs appear in front of RMS St. Helena. The island’s 4500 residents are often waiting impatiently for the ship’s arrival and panic if the schedule changes. Director Thomas Denzel and his team went on the journey to Saint Helena and met the people living on the island. Many of the residents are descendants of people who were sent into exile there by the British crown - the most famous among them, the French Emperor Napoleon. This is a report about life at the end of the world, loneliness, unique vegetation, and a very special journey.

This mini-documentary explores the wildlife, culture and history of the remote island of Saint Helena, a UK Overseas Territory in the Atlantic. We discover Longwood House, where Napoleon Bonaparte was imprisoned for the last six years of his life after the Battle of Waterloo. And we find Saint Helena's unique wirebird and follow its confirmation. Saint Helena is home to many unique plants and arguably the island's greatest treasure; its unique arthropods (more than 400 of which occur on Saint Helena and no where else on Earth).

Located in the South Atlantic Ocean on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, more than 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) from the nearest major landmass, Saint Helena is one of the most remote places in the world. The nearest port on the continent is Moçâmedes in southern Angola; connections to Cape Town in South Africa are used for most shipping needs, such as the mail boat that serves the island, the RMS St Helena.

The island is associated with two other isolated islands in the southern Atlantic, also British territories: Ascension Island about 1,300 kilometres (810 mi) due northwest in more equatorial waters and Tristan da Cunha, which is well outside the tropics 2,430 kilometres (1,510 mi) to the south. The island is situated in the Western Hemisphere and has the same longitude as Cornwall in the United Kingdom. Despite its remote location, it is classified as being in West Africa by the United Nations.

The British Nationality Act 1981 reclassified Saint Helena and the other Crown colonies as British Dependent Territories. The islanders lost their right of abode in Britain. For the next 20 years, many could find only low-paid work with the island government, and the only available employment outside Saint Helena was on the Falkland Islands and Ascension Island. The Development and Economic Planning Department (which still operates) was formed in 1988 to contribute to raising the living standards of the people of Saint Helena.

In 1989, Prince Andrew launched the replacement RMS St Helena to serve the island; the vessel was specially built for the Cardiff–Cape Town route and featured a mixed cargo/passenger layout.This service ended in January 2018, as the fastest and easiest access to St Helena is via the airport, with it's first commercial flight being made in 2017.

Under the provisions of the 1833 India Act, control of Saint Helena passed from the East India Company to the British Crown, and it became a crown colony. Subsequent administrative cost-cutting triggered a long-term population decline: those who could afford to do so tended to leave the island for better opportunities elsewhere. The latter half of the 19th century saw the advent of steamships not reliant on trade winds, as well as the diversion of Far East trade away from the traditional South Atlantic shipping lanes to a route via the Red Sea (which, prior to the building of the Suez Canal, involved a short overland section). So the number of ships calling at the island fell from 1,100 in 1855 to only 288 in 1889.

In 1840, a British naval station established to suppress the African slave trade was based on the island, and between 1840 and 1849 over 15,000 freed slaves, known as "Liberated Africans", were landed there.

After Napoleon's death, the thousands of temporary visitors were withdrawn and the East India Company resumed full control of Saint Helena. Between 1815 and 1830, the EIC made the packet schooner St Helena available to the government of the island, which made multiple trips per year between the island and the Cape, carrying passengers both ways and supplies of wine and provisions back to the island.

Napoleon praised Saint Helena's coffee during his exile on the island, and the product enjoyed a brief popularity in Paris in the years after his death.

In 1815, the British government selected Saint Helena as the place of detention for Napoleon Bonaparte. He was taken to the island in October 1815. Britain also took the precaution of sending a garrison of soldiers, with an experienced officer (Edward Nicolls), to uninhabited Ascension Island, which lay between St. Helena and Europe.

Napoleon stayed at the Briars pavilion on the grounds of the Balcombe family's home until his permanent residence at Longwood House was completed in December 1815. Napoleon died there on 5 May 1821

In 1657, Oliver Cromwell granted the English East India Company a charter to govern Saint Helena and, the following year, the company decided to fortify the island and colonise it with planters. The long tradition that the early settlers included many who had lost their home in the 1666 Great Fire of London has been shown to be a myth. The first governor, Captain John Dutton, arrived in 1659, making Saint Helena one of Britain's earliest colonies outside North America and the Caribbean. A fort and houses were built. After the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, the East India Company received a royal charter giving it the sole right to fortify and colonise the island. The fort was renamed James Fort and the town Jamestown, in honour of the Duke of York, later King James II of England.

Between January and May 1673, the Dutch East India Company forcibly took the island, before English reinforcements restored English East India Company control. The company experienced difficulty attracting new immigrants, and sentiments of unrest and rebellion arose among the inhabitants. Ecological problems of deforestation, soil erosion, vermin and drought led Governor Isaac Pyke in 1715 to suggest that the population be moved to Mauritius, but this was not acted upon and the company continued to subsidise the community because of the island's strategic location. A census in 1723 recorded 1,110 people, including 610 slaves.

Most historical accounts state that the island was sighted on 21 May 1502 by Galician navigator João da Nova sailing in the service of Portugal, and that he named it Santa Helena after Helena of Constantinople. A paper published in 2015 observes that 21 May is probably a Protestant rather than a Catholic or Orthodox feast day, and the date was first quoted in 1596 by Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, who was probably mistaken because the island was discovered several decades before the Reformation and the start of Protestantism. An alternative discovery date of 3 May is suggested as being historically more credible; it is the Catholic feast day of the finding of the True Cross by Saint Helena in Jerusalem, and cited by Odoardo Duarte Lopes and Sir Thomas Herbert.

Another theory holds that the island found by da Nova was actually Tristan da Cunha, 2,430 kilometres (1,510 mi) to the south, and that Saint Helena was discovered by some of the ships attached to the squadron of the Estêvão da Gama expedition on 30 July 1503 (as reported in the account of clerk Thomé Lopes). Thomé Lopes mapped St Helena's geographic position with reasonable accuracy when he quoted its distance and direction with respect to locations such as Ascension, Cape Verde, São Tomé and the Cape of Good Hope. The island's map location with respect to Ascension and the Cape of Good Hope was likewise described following the 1505 Portuguese expedition led by Francisco de Almeida.

Two hundred years ago today, on October 15, 1815, Napoleon arrived on the island of Saint Helena where he was exiled for the rest of his life.

1. Saint Helena is in the South Atlantic, 2,500 miles east of Brazil, 1,200 miles west of Africa. It covers an area of just 47 square miles.