Photo: Dr. Thomas Liptak (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A self-guided audio walking tour of Philipsburg, the capital of Sint Maarten, a town laid out in 1733 on a narrow sandbar between Great Bay and the Great Salt Pond. It starts on the Great Bay Boardwalk and goes to the Emancipation Monument at the edge of the salt pond, where enslaved people raked and carried salt until emancipation on the Dutch side on 1 July 1863. Then along Front Street: the Sint Maarten Museum in a nineteenth-century plantation house, the Pasanggrahan, built as the government guesthouse in 1904, and the Catholic church of St Martin of Tours, to the Courthouse on Wathey Square, put up by 1793, and the shingle-clad Methodist church. For those with time, the walk ends out along the bay at Fort Amsterdam, built by the Dutch in 1631, where Peter Stuyvesant lost a leg in 1644. The fort is well over a kilometre west of Front Street: a water taxi or the ship's own excursion is the safer choice for anyone short of time.
8 narrations, yours to keep — no subscription, no expiry. Works offline once downloaded, and if it isn’t for you we’ll refund it.
Going somewhere with no signal? Put the guide on your home screen first, then download it from that icon while you are on wi-fi — that way you download once, and it works in airplane mode with no roaming charges. Show me the order →
Every claim in this tour traces back to a named source — excavation records, the heritage authority for the site, and the primary texts themselves. Nothing is copied from other guidebooks, and anything we can't source doesn't make the recording.
Each stop is built from OpenStreetMap · 52 features in this old town (the field-surveyed mapping database behind Apple Maps), Wikidata · 6 cross-referenced entries (peer-reviewed structured records), the heritage authority below, and the primary historical texts where they exist.
Cross-referenced against Modern excavation publications · academic peer-review.
Every sentence is checked against those sources before it is recorded. If a claim can't be traced, it doesn't make the audio.
Every tour is reviewed by a person before it goes on sale. Stop selection, the route and anything ambiguous come back to the editor for a decision, and those questions routinely send a stop back for another accuracy pass. Nothing publishes on a machine’s say-so.
Spot anything inaccurate? Email [email protected] — fixed in the next pass.
Marks the end of slavery on the Dutch side on 1 July 1863, beside the pond where enslaved people raked and carried salt; at low water the walls of the old salt pans show.
A nineteenth-century plantation house at 7 Front Street, with Arawak pottery, material from HMS Proselyte and exhibits on Hurricane Luis.
Built in 1904 as the government guesthouse, later the governor's residence and known as the island's oldest hotel; portraits of the Dutch royal family still hang inside.
Put up by 1793 for Commander Willem Hendrik Rink as town hall, weighing house and jail, with a wooden pineapple, the old Caribbean sign of welcome, on its cupola.
A 1979 replica of the church of 1851, its front clad in wooden shingles.
Built by the Dutch in 1631 on the headland between Great Bay and Little Bay; Peter Stuyvesant lost a leg attacking it in 1644, and brown pelicans nest around the ruins.
Tap "Start Walking Tour" and allow location access. The map shows all 8 narration points.
Follow the suggested route or explore freely. GPS tracks your position. Reach a site and the narration plays automatically.
Each site has its own narration. 8 narration points.
Narrations play when you reach each site. No buttons, no track numbers. Walk naturally — the stories find you.
Premium narration that sounds like a documentary. Warm and knowledgeable, not a textbook reading.
Every narration is drafted, cross-checked against primary sources, then passed through a second editorial pass that strips unsupported claims. Dates, names, and citations verified.
See all narration points on the map. Tap any point to hear it early or replay it later.
Every narrated point in Philipsburg — Front Street, Fort Amsterdam and the Divided Island, each with its own narration.
Spend an hour or a full day. Skip sites, revisit favourites, take breaks. The tour adapts to you.
8 narration points, including Great Bay Boardwalk, Emancipation Monument and the Great Salt Pond, Sint Maarten Museum, Pasanggrahan and St. Martin of Tours' Church. That is about 11 minutes of narration in all, and you walk between the stops at your own pace.
Yes. It plays in your phone’s browser as you walk: no guide, no group, no app to install and no fixed start time.
Three ways, all built in:
The map-tap option means you can stand anywhere — even at home before you travel — and play any narration. GPS just makes it hands-free while you’re actually walking the site.
No. Use the “Download for offline” button before you go, and the entire tour — audio, maps, narration text — works without any data connection. Tap-to-play and the map both work fully offline. GPS itself doesn’t need data; only the download does.
Add the icon first, then download from the icon. On iPhone a guide downloaded in Safari cannot be seen by the home screen icon, so downloading first means downloading the whole thing twice.
Putting it on your home screen — iPhone or iPad (Safari):
On Android (Chrome): tap the three-dot menu at the top right, tap Add to Home screen (some phones say Install app), then confirm. On Android either order works.
If you opened this link from inside Instagram, Facebook or Gmail, you are in that app’s built-in browser. It cannot add anything to your home screen, and a guide downloaded there is thrown away when the app closes. Open the link in Safari or Chrome first.
Two backstops. First, the map shows every site — just tap the marker for the place in front of you. Second, you can manually queue any narration even when GPS is off. The platform never assumes GPS works; it’s the convenience layer, not the gate.
The audio runs ~1½–2 hours total, but you walk at your own pace. 8 narration points across the site. Most visitors take 2–4 hours; some spread it over multiple visits. Once you buy it, it’s yours — there’s no expiry and no subscription. Come back next year if you like; the link in your receipt always works.
One purchase covers one device session. Most couples share earbuds and use a single phone — the audio is paced for that. If you want everyone listening on their own device, each person needs their own purchase. We do not gate sharing aggressively; we trust visitors to do the right thing.
Full refund if you never trigger a single narration on-site. Partial refund based on how far you got. See the refund policy for specifics.