Charlotte Amalie: the Danish Caribbean port that became…

Founded by the Danes as a trading base, including the slave trade, Charlotte Amalie became U.S. territory only in 1917 with the purchase of the Virgin Islands.

The center, a Danish colonial port that passed to the United States in 1917, is comfortably explored on foot.

The Fort Christian, a seventeenth-century Danish fortress painted a vivid red, remains the oldest building still standing in the American Virgin Islands.

A short walk away, the Ninety-nine Steps, a historic staircase built with bricks carried as ballast from Danish ships, connect the harbor to the hillside neighborhoods of the city.

Continuing, you walk along Main Street, formerly a Danish commercial warehouse zone now transformed into a duty-free shopping street for cruise ship tourists.

Toward evening, the Beracha Veshalom Synagogue, among the oldest still active in the Americas, preserves a sand floor according to an ancient Sephardic tradition.

The sand on the synagogue floor recalls, according to Sephardic tradition, the flight into the desert of Spanish and Portuguese Jews persecuted during the Inquisition, some of whom settled on these very islands.

The United States purchased the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917 for twenty-five million dollars in gold, primarily for strategic reasons related to the security of the nearby Panama Canal.