My first visit to the Cayman Islands was 35 years ago.

That year, 400 people visited the main island, where George Town was a sleepy collection of buildings, most roads were unpaved, and fishing was a major industry.

The famed Seven Mile Beach was just that – a beach stretching north along the island’s west shore from George Town to North West Point. Today, it’s an unbroken string of resort hotels, and it takes a careful eye to peel back the gloss of years to find the old George Town.

Not so on Little Cayman, where most of the island’s 22 miles of shoreline remains undeveloped and life is softly spiced by the flavor of the old Caribbean. About 100 people live there year round, the airstrip is small and unlighted, and places offering accommodations can be counted on the fingers of two hands.

Point of Sand on Little Cayman Island is one of the world’s great beaches. White sand curves along the island’s eastern end, between lush palm trees and a shallow, sheltered lagoon with impossibly clear water.

“It’s always quiet,” Cate Ferreira, a resident of Little Cayman, said about this extraordinary spot. “You rarely see anyone else, but if you do, the beach is big enough to absorb everyone.

“And in the lagoon you see everything, from rays to sharks,” Ms. Ferreira, the manager of a fish and dive resort on the island, added. “It’s a really beautiful place, and you see the Brac [the local name for Cayman Brac] off in the distance.”

The lagoon also contains brightly colored fish, gaudy coral, and barracuda. The area’s reefs – bleached by warm sea temperatures several years ago – have recovered. Visibility normally is 100 feet or more, although all objects at the edges of sight are blue, blue, blue.

The largest nesting colony of red-footed boobies in the New World is on Little Cayman, and iguanas emerge from the island’s lush tropical vegetation to eat bananas offered by tourists inclined to feed them.

Point of Sand is not the only beach on Little Cayman – merely the best. More than a dozen beaches dot the island’s 22 miles of shoreline.

On a recent trip to Little Cayman, my home base for exploring the island was the Southern Cross Club, where Ms. Ferreira is manager.

I shuttled from the international jetport on Grand Cayman across 30 minutes of Caribbean Sea to land on Little Cayman.

When the plane door opened, intense, humid heat washed over passengers mostly dressed for more northerly climes.

We saw coconut palms waving in the breeze and traffic signs warning that iguanas have the right of way on the island’s sun-baked roads.

Magnificent frigate birds wheeled above the blue water of a lagoon that runs seven miles along the island’s south shore. Bananaquits and grackles whistled and cackled through the coconut palms along a coral-sand beach.

All drinking water on the island is either produced through reverse osmosis – filtered, basically – or brought from elsewhere, as the island’s residents and visitors long ago outstripped what nature could provide.

“We have a lot of guests here who used to go to Grand Cayman,” Ms. Ferreira said. “They tell us this is what the big island was like, that it reminds them of what Grand Cayman used to be.”

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Airfare from New York to Little Cayman on Continental and Cayman Airways is $489 round trip; the journey takes seven hours and 20 minutes and involves changing in Tampa and George Town.

Most resorts on Little Cayman offer packages of three, five, seven, or more nights. Prices listed here include lodging, meals and airport transfers.

A FEW EXAMPLES:

A five-night stay at the Southern Cross Club costs $1,410 ($1,680 for divers) during the high season, December 20 to April 18, or $1,190 ($1,480 for divers) during low season, April 18 to December 20, www.southerncrossclub.com.

A five-night stay at Pirates Point costs $1,125 ($1,385 for divers) December 20 to April 15, or $995 ($1,300 for divers) April 16 to December 15, www.piratespointresort.com.

A seven-night stay at Little Cayman Beach Resort costs $1,540 ($2,140 for divers) December 16 to April 14, or $1,383 ($1,983 for divers) April 15 to December 15, www.littlecayman.com.