David Gilmour, Who Turned a Tiny Island Into a Resort, Dies at 91

David Gilmour, a Canadian-born entrepreneur who in the 1990s built a luxury resort on Wakaya, a tiny island he owned in Fiji, and then created Fiji Natural Artesian Water, turning a local resource into a leading bottled brand, died on June 11 in Manhattan. He was 91.

The cause was cardiac arrest, said David Roth, a friend and business partner.

By the time he bought Wakaya from two business partners in 1987, Mr. Gilmour had built several businesses over 30 years. He imported Scandinavian home furnishings and built high-end stereos. He helped assemble a chain of hotels in the South Pacific, which made him familiar with the archipelago nation of Fiji, and he co-founded a gold-mining company.

But there was something different about Wakaya. At the time, he was mourning the death of his only child, Erin Gilmour, who had been murdered in her apartment in Toronto in 1983.

He called the island “the last bastion of sanity in the world,” his wife, Jillian (Sweeney) Gilmour, said in a phone interview. “He thought when everything went kerflooey, this is where he would go.

“The island itself is so beautiful,” she continued. “There’s an area called Chieftain’s Leap, with soaring cliffs, where peregrine falcons make their nests.”

In 1990, Mr. Gilmour opened the Wakaya Club & Spa, a cluster of eight free-standing suites on a former coconut plantation. At the time, he said, he opened it as “really just a place where my friends, those I can’t put up in my own home, can come and share the peace.” He added: “I don’t see it as terribly commercial, frankly. It will probably only break even.”

It nonetheless became popular with celebrities, including Tom Cruise, Bill and Melinda Gates (who spent part of their honeymoon there) and Keith Richards, who fell out of a palm tree there in 2006 and was flown to a hospital in New Zealand with a head injury.

One day in the 1990s, Mr. Gilmour saw guests at the property drinking Evian water.

“He said, ‘There’s something wrong with this picture,’ and I said, “What do you mean?’” Ms. Gilmour said. “And he said, ‘We’re on our own island, and they’re drinking water from Lake Geneva. I know that with Fiji’s rainfall, there must be a greater water source.’”

Mr. Gilmour learned of an underground aquifer beneath the volcanic highlands of the Fijian island of Viti Levu, with water rich in the mineral silica. In 1996, his company began packaging and shipping its distinctive square bottles around the…