St. John’s Island, which is today one famous holiday retreat for both Singaporeans and tourists, has quite a unique history. Therefore, this island is indeed really worth visiting. The island today has built out facilities such as bungalows, sport fields and other leisure options.
The St. John’s Island has a beautiful hilly geography, which makes the island very attractive as a leisure site today. The size of St. John’s is 40.5 hectares making it suitable to host several fans of island leisure.
St. John’s Island has been a very important stopover point for all those pilgrims who returned from their yearly pilgrimage called El Hadj from Meccah. The island also served as a stopover point to screen the immigrants’ health state. Everyone who had been suspicious of having any serious illness had to stay here in quarantine. The most common illnesses these days brought from Saudi Arabia among many other countries contained the Cholera, the Beri-Beri and the Lepra. St. John’s Island has kept this role for quite a long time, until the Fifties thereafter when these illnesses had mostly ceased to exist, the quarantine station has transformed into a drug rehabilitation centre and a prison was serving here. This role of St. John’s Island was kept until the Seventies when in 1975 it got a much more pleasant role to be a leisure island. Interesting additional information about the island is that, it was Sir Stamford Raffles’ anchorage site before his meeting with the Singaporean Malay chief at that time in 1819 before he had made the island country the colony of the British Empire.
The original flora and fauna of St. John’s has been nicely preserved and several excursion routes, soccer and tennis fields had been built here with the inclusion of several picnic fields too. You can even see some mangrove here and the place is excellent for the divers; however, everyone must be overly careful in order not to hurt the biological balance of the coral reef. There are holiday campsites with dormitories which can accommodate a maximum number of 60 persons without overnight possibilities and a bungalow on the island which can accommodate a maximum number of 10 persons at a time, making you to be able to spend a couple of nights here. During the weekends, several visitors come to enjoy the relaxed pace of St.John’s Island. The jetty Terminal is in the Southern part of the island. You can cook in both the bungalow and in the dormitory but there is no food store on the island. The jetty can take people to St. John’s in already 15 minutes and from Marina South Pier there is a ferry going to the island.
The island has also kept its role of research and studies in many ways as it houses the Marine Science Institute of Singapore together with the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority of the Singaporean Aquaculture Centre. In a smaller part of the establishment, a smaller detention centre for illegal immigrants has also remained to operate which makes the islands past and future to meet perfectly with each other.