Which Caribbean Island is the Best?
Wicked winter has just arrived in our city with our first snow fall. It’s time for North Americans and Europeans to search for a sunny tropical place to escape the frigid cold. What Caribbean Island is the best place to travel? Which Caribbean Island will provide a safe and relaxing vacation?
We have travelled Round-The-World for three years. While Saint Lucia is not in our list of the Top 20 Countries to Travel, it is an excellent choice for a winter escape. It offers a safe, laid back, and friendly Caribbean Island. Both the country and the beaches are sparsely populated.
With 70% of the island covered in rain forest, Saint Lucia is an ideal destination if you like nature, hiking or birding. Volcanic gthermal areas and mountains like the Pitons add to the spectacular scenery.
Unfortunately, my Nikon DSLR camera broke at the beginning of this trip. I took all the photographs in this post on my iPhone 12 Pro, but I used the Luminar Neo photo editor to add a polarizing filter effect.
The Highlights of This Post
This post will give you a taste of the beautiful Caribbean scenery that awaits you in Saint Lucia, one of only two countries in the world that is named after a woman. The other country is Ireland, named after the female Gaelic goddess of the land, Eire.
The travel destinations and topics described in this post are:
- Pigeon Island National Park (NP) including historic Fort Rodney
- Beaches of the Castries Area, especially: —
— Pigeon Island Beach
— Reduit Beach
— Cas en Bas Beach
- Travel Planning:
— Can I see all of Saint Lucia in a week?
— How Safe is it to Visit Saint Lucia?
— What’s the Best Time to Visit Saint Lucia?
One Caribbean Island You Must See Part 2
A second future post, One Caribbean Island You Must See #2, will cover the even more spectacular Soufriere area.
Soufriere to Castries
Most tourists stay at an all-inclusive hotel on the beach. We opted for staying at a family-run pension, renting a car, and exploring the island. We found a hotel near Soufriere since it is the most central location to the majority of the nature sights in Saint Lucia. In the north is Castries, the capital and sole city of Saint Lucia. It is a popular destination for the cruise and urban-oriented crowd.
The 40 km itinerary from Soufriere to Castries and Cas en Bas Beach is shown on the Saint Lucia Travel Map. The roads are good but mountainous, so it takes at least 1.2 hours, depending on Castries traffic. The travel time also depends on how many photo stops you take along the way as there are many picturesque views such as Mirador Pitons Soufriere, Canaries, Anse La Raye, and Marigot Bay. This will be covered in the second post, One Caribbean Island You Must See #2,
The road goes through every town, so the driving is slow. On the plus side, you get to see village life. Children are walking to school. People are waiting on the side of the road for the “bus” — usually a van. Or they ride in the back of some very large trucks.
Stalls sell snacks and meals. This fish vendor was right on the main highway entering Castries. It is another 14 km and 25 minutes to get to Pigeon Island.
Pigeon Island National Park
Most of the Fort Rodney Hike is an easy, flat trail noted for birds.
Both Britain and France wanted Saint Lucia for its slave-based sugar and cotton industries. Ownership of the island changed hands continuously. About 85% of Lucians are direct descendants of these black slaves. While the official language is English, many locals speak Lucian French Creole and many place names are French.
If you are from North America, the rivalry between superpowers Britain and France had a big impact on your history. The Treaty of Paris 1763 ended the Seven Years War. This was the world’s first multinational war pitting Britain, Prussia and Hanover against France, Austria, Sweden, Saxony, Russia, and Spain. This war made Britain the supreme imperialist power in the world.
The main goal of Britain was to destroy France as a commercial rival, and so they attacked the French navy and took away most of the French colonies in the Americas. As part of the peace process, Britain allowed France to keep a couple of its seized colonies. France gave up Quebec in order to regain the valuable sugar colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint Lucia, and the tiny fishing islands of St-Pierre and Miquelon near Quebec. Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain. Imagine what a difference it would have made had France kept Quebec and Spain kept Florida!
Nineteen years later, Admiral George Rodney completed Fort Rodney to keep an eye on the French. The last part of the hike to the fort is steep but short. Pigeon Island is only 40 km (25 mi) south of the French colony of Martinique. To improve visibility, he even ordered all trees on Pigeon Island to be cut down.
As a result, Admiral Rodney could see when the French fleet left Fort Royal, Martinique. Within two hours, his fleet of 100 ships sailed north from Saint Lucia. He was able to catch and defeat the French fleet at the nearby island of Dominica in the Battle of the Saintes (1782), an important victory that was part of the American Revolutionary War. How interconnected we all are.
The cobblestone platform at the top of the fort housed three 24-pounder cannons. The name refers to the projectile weight not the cannon. Each three-metre long cannon weighs 2500 kg and had a crew of 12 gunners and one powder boy. I wonder how they got these heavy cannons up here?
The cobblestone platform was also used to collect rainwater, which flowed via drains along the wall into a well. It was made fit for drinking using a limestone filter. The low building on the right was the powder magazine.
But the main reason to climb to the fort is for the spectacular views. This is Signal Peak using the cell phone “normal lens” (58mm equivalent). Signal Peak is where the British would watch the French fleet leave their main base in the Caribbean.
This is the wide-angle (26mm) view. Pigeon Island was once a hideout for pirates. The Frenchman, Jambe de Bois (wooden leg) and his crew of 330 men were the first Europeans to settle in Saint Lucia. In 1554, he captured and ransomed four Spanish galleons from the Spanish Carribean base in Cuba.
This is the ultra-wide-angle (16mm) view. Pigeon Island and Castries served as an American naval air station during World War II to help protect the Panama Canal against attacks by German U-boats.
Nature — Birds and Flowers
Another reason to visit Saint Lucia is nature. There are 180 species of birds, of which six species are endemic to Saint Lucia. Our son, an avid birder and recorder on Cornell University’s eBird tracking site, saw 70 species in one week, putting him in 13th place all-time for Saint Lucia. He saw 28 species in the north.
The Shining Bird of Paradise (Heliconia metallica), which originated in the Amazon, is named after the avian Bird-of-Paradise found in Papua New Guinea. Many of our speciality plants and flowers grow wildly all over the island as well as in beautiful botanical gardens, which will be a topic in the next post, One Caribbean Island You Must See #2
Beaches of Castries Area
Pigeon Island Beach
Pigeon Island is no longer an island. It was joined by a wide, man-made causeway in 1972. Heading back from the NP, we stopped at the public part of Pigeon Island Beach, which has views of Fort Rodney. The public beach is located in the centre of the photo below.
The middle part of the causeway houses the huge Sandals Grande resort, which appears on the right of the photo above.
At the entrance to the resort part of the beach, vendors have set up stalls. We talked with a turbaned Rastafarian follower about his beliefs. He had a stall selling cedar and mahogany tikis and other carvings.
We headed south to Gros Islet Beach on Bay St. where we saw a fisher couple cleaning their colourful catch of the day. The unattractive beach was the width of a postage stamp. One of the locals showed us where the beach used to extend — maybe ten metres or yards further out. She said the beach area has been significantly reduced as the ocean level has risen due to climate change.
Reduit Beach
We had a great meal at the Spice of India (Google rating 4.7) restaurant in Rodney Bay village. We ordered the Chef’s Tasting Menu (East Carribean Dollars ECD 53) with options such as Chicken Tikka Masala, Achari Lamb, Bhuna Lamb, and Lamb Xacuti. The food was delicious with cardamon and cumin flavours. We talked with the owner/chef, who works here because he married a St. Lucian woman. His wife lived 1.5 years in Mumbai but hated it.
Then we drove to the coast to enjoy Reduit Beach. Technically all beaches are public and owned by the government, but many major resorts own all the land surrounding some famous beaches and charge excessive fees to use them. Reduit Beach has free access, nearby refreshment facilities, and a very long stretch of sand that did not feel overcrowded. It is a good place to cool off for both tourists and locals, many of whom come from the nearby city of Castries. This beach came with Caribbean music.
Cas en Bas Beach
From here we drove east to Cas en Bas Beach. This is the site of a major resort development fail. Let’s hope it never is built. Notice how few people are on this beach. BTW, this is an extra wide-angle shot by panning the Apple iPhone using the panorama feature.
There are only a couple of tourist facilities here; in particular, Marjorie’s Restaurant (Google 4.1). What a great place this would be to turn into a nature park.
Travel Planning
Can I see all of Saint Lucia in a week?
The short answer is yes! Though most travellers just relax on a beach for their whole stay. Saint Lucia is very small (617 km2 or 238 sq mi) but lacks expressways so you need to allow time to get from place to place.
The island is a bit larger than San Francisco County (600 km2 or 232 sq mi) and a bit smaller than the original City of Toronto (630 km2 or 243 sq mi) with 3 million people compared to Saint Lucia with 184,400 people. Instead of urban sprawl, 70% of Saint Lucia is covered in rainforest. In fact, the centre of the island is mountainous with no roads.
How Safe is it to Visit Saint Lucia?
Saint Lucia seems very safe, especially compared to some of the top destinations in the Caribbean Islands. As one American family that has visited Saint Lucia ten times said, they can trust that their children can stay out all night with the locals and come home safely. This could not happen in other Caribbean countries like Jamaica.
See the comparative table in the post Travel Safety. The top four Caribbean destinations — Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Bahamas, and Jamaica — have some of the highest crime indexes in the world. If you are staying at a countryside resort, you will probably be isolated from city crime.
What’s the Best Time to Visit Saint Lucia?
Mean annual temperatures range from 26 °C (78.8 °F) to 32 °C (89.6 °F). More importantly, it did not feel humid. Only the June to December period is wet and stormy — September to October is hurricane season in the Carribean.
