Is a Madonna Hit Actually About This Tropical Island?

Last night I dreamt of San Pedro Just like I’d never gone I knew the song

I

had Madonna’s 1986 hit “La Isla Bonita” stuck in my head from the moment I landed in San Pedro, Belize. It’s a 13-minute flight from the international airport in Belize City, and the small Cessna flies low over shallow, impossibly cerulean ocean cays and reefs before thudding down onto a runway incongruously in the middle of the sleepy, low-slung island town.

They’ve certainly capitalized on the possibility of connection. On the way to my hotel, we pass by La Isla Bonita Yacht Club and Google searches for “La Isla Bonita” invariably bring up sites on the island. Even in the marketing materials I’ve read for my hotel, Alaïa Belize, Autograph Collection Hotels, the moniker make an appearance.

Most of the accommodations on San Pedro are intimate affairs—clusters of small buildings like the Yacht Club. Alaïa is the first globally branded, high-rise hotel on the island, with its angular Miami Beach-feeling skyscraper of glass and white, but it somehow manages to fit the space. From my enormous balcony with cathedral-high ceilings, I spend mornings watching the sun rise over the Caribbean Sea and posting Instagram stories with “La Isla Bonita” before ordering room service to eat on the kitchen island of my enormous one-bedroom suite.

In between bites of eggs and toast, I begin to wonder as the song repeats again on my Instagram feed, Did Madonna actually come here and write the song about this island?

It’s certainly plausible, I think, although Belize isn’t exactly on the pop megastar concert circuit, nor was it particularly sought after as a luxury vacation destination in the early 1980s (though that’s exactly what made San Pedro famous in the first place). It was the vacation destination that didn’t feel invaded by vacation purveyors. And even though I’m staying in a Marriott, it still doesn’t feel that way.

However, the refrain of the song describes a generic island experience that doesn’t betray any clues about whether it’s the San Pedro:

Tropical, the island breeze
All of nature wild and free
This is where I long to be
La isla bonita
And when the samba played
The sun would set so high
Ring through my ears and sting my eyes
Your Spanish lullaby

There are some mixed cultural markers here. Samba originates in Brazil, which is largely Lusophone, or Portuguese speaking, not Spanish.

Belize, however, is much more Spanish. Although the official language is English, a vestige of the country’s history as part of the British Empire, just over half the population is Hispanic, and the language is widely spoken, including on San Pedro. The country’s overall culture is a mix of influences—British, Mayan, Afro-Caribbean, Hispanic—for which there isn’t a better descriptor apart from simply “Belizean.”

San Pedro, the Spanish version of “Saint Peter,” is also an incredibly common name in Hispanic-influenced locales around the world. Just in the Caribbean alone, there are also San Pedros in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.

Outside of the website mention, I’m not hit with “La Isla Bonita” mentions anywhere else on the property. The hotel seems to hint at the thematic elements of the song at the dreamlike Vista Rooftop, with its pool suspended over the hotel’s entry courtyard stories above. Step out of the lobby and look up, and you can sometimes see guests swimming over the round “portholes” cut into the floor.

Similarly, I don’t hear the song itself outside of my own Instagram stories. It doesn’t come on overhead while I’m lounging in a pool cabana or sipping local Belikin Beer, waiting for my wood-fired garlic prawn pizza at the beach bar, or learning how to make espresso “caviar” to garnish the craft cocktails I’m learning how to make in a class at the hotel’s mixology bar.

Perhaps it’s a matter of recency. “La Isla Bonita” was released almost four decades ago. While most of the venues I visited on San Pedro didn’t shy away from vintage hits (there was an enjoyable amount of disco—of which I’m a fan—at the rooftop), the island’s spinners seemed to favor other ways to get the drunk-or-on-their-way-there tourists turnt. And as a pleasant bonus, they generally did it without relying on the cruise ship trick of trading off tracks between Bob Marley’s Legend album and Jimmy Buffett’s top hits.

For years, Madonna herself wasn’t specific in interviews whenever the topic would come up. The industry generally reported that the mention of San Pedro was apocryphal, or a generic nod to Hispanic culture for a singer making her first foray into the then-blossoming, white-hot genre of Latin Pop. Yes, there was that time in the 1980s when half the radio airplay was Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine, or Menudo.

So while Madonna had a crossover hit with the Latin Pop inspired “La Isla Bonita,” it wasn’t until 2016 that fans of the song finally got a bit of clarification on the location in the song—and directly from Queen Madge herself:

“I don’t know where San Pedro is,” she told Rolling Stone.

“At that point, I wasn’t a person who went on holidays to beautiful islands. I may have been on the way to the studio and seen an exit ramp for San Pedro.”

Given that the song itself was recorded at Channel Recording Studios in Los Angeles, the “San Pedro” that would have been denoted on freeway signage would have been the neighborhood of San Pedro, home of the Port of Los Angeles cruise terminal.

Okay, so San Pedro is a little less “tropical intrigue” and a little more “opening credits of The Love Boat,” but what difference does it make?

Belize’s island escape is a fascinating find on its own merits. There’s multifaceted, culture, cuisine that’s equal parts Spanish, Indigenous, and Caribbean, and an abundance of places to set up shop in the ever-present tropical tradewinds with a good book, a Madonna playlist, and a fruity boozy drink. When not focusing on languor at the resort, it seemed to follow me, whether it was the relaxed pace of the all-terrain-tired golf carts lining the streets or the “always something more important than rushing” ethos that seems to guide everyone’s days here.

For me, personally, I’ll always make the connection.

I fell in love with San Pedro
Warm wind carried on the sea, he called to me
Te dijo: “te amo”
I prayed that the days would last, they went so fast