A big destination wedding has its own particular kind of magic. The night before, your favorite cousins are at the swim-up bar swapping stories with people they'd just met at the welcome dinner.
Destination weddings
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There's a moment at every good destination wedding when the whole group, finally relaxed after a long travel day, drifts together for the welcome dinner.
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A big wedding in Barbados has a particular kind of warmth to it. By the second night your guests have figured out their favorite rum cocktail, half the group is already trading dinner recommendations from the Oistins fish fry.
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Some destinations were practically built for the big family wedding. Hawaii is one of them.
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Hawaii has been quietly one of the most welcoming wedding destinations in the world for LGBTQ+ couples for a long time before the rest of the country caught up. Same-sex marriage has been fully legal here since 2013, and the islands have built a wedding culture around the kind of warm, ceremony-honoring hospitality that recognizes every couple’s love story on…
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Saying “I do” in Tulum can absolutely be legally binding! Mexico’s civil ceremony process is well-worn, and Tulum’s own Registro Civil handles foreign weddings from the bohemian hotel zone and the surrounding jungle every week. The catch with Tulum specifically: the boutique, low-rise hotel zone has more variable legal-coordination depth than the bigger all-inclusive corridors of Cancun or central Riviera…
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Saying “I do” in Riviera Maya doesn’t have to mean managing the legal paperwork twice. A civil ceremony performed in Quintana Roo state is recognized internationally, which means you can marry on a Mayakoba beach or in a jungle cenote and have the marriage legally binding the moment your acta de matrimonio is signed. The process is detailed but well-worn,…
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There's a moment a few days into an Aruba wedding when the rest of the world goes quiet. Trade winds drift in off the Caribbean, your guests are barefoot in the sand with a drink in hand, and the sun is just beginning to slip behind the horizon.
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Somewhere between the first sip of cold rum punch and the second time you look up at the Pitons, St. Lucia stops feeling like a vacation and starts feeling like a setting. The light here does something you’ll only really notice in photos later, the way it pours down those volcanic peaks at sunset, turning the rainforest gold and the…
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Some wedding destinations earn their luxury reputation slowly, over decades of word-of-mouth and quietly perfect dinners. Barbados is one of them. The Platinum Coast on the west side of the island has been a favorite of the kind of guests who prefer the second glass of rosé to the first, where the Caribbean settles into pools of glassy turquoise at…
