This Caribbean island is different. Alison Humes delves into the history of a diverse land, competed for by both the French and the British, that's now on a roll
Waking up at the Jade Mountain resort is like finding yourself in a promotional fantasy for the sensuality of the tropical Caribbean. My eyes open to St. Lucia's Pitons, two intensely green, sharply jagged peaks that rise dramatically at water's edge. The light at 5:30 in the morning is pale and dreamy. The ferns around the room are full of moisture. Every surface of nature is green. A whir of beating wings has woken me up: Some cowbirds have discovered the butter bread that I left on the coffee table and have poked a hole in the plastic bag. The room, enormous, has only three walls, so I am virtually outside. The breeze riffles the surface of the water in the infinity pool that lines one side of the room, and its blue-glass tiles catch and reflect dappled light on the ceiling. It is clearly absurd that I am here alone—the place is all about attracting well-heeled birds and bees. The mood is tranquil, the sun is still soft, and there's a slight haze over everything. Or maybe it's just the combination of bleary eyes and mosquito netting draping the bed that's giving everything that shimmer.
There is, however, another perspective. When I arrived, I had felt a bit as if I were checking in to a spaceship, with bare stone and steel walkways suspended in the air. Jade Mountain's design is bold, but the edges of the place are angular and sharp, and the plants that will eventually fill things in are small. Spanking new, the building hasn't yet settled into its surroundings, as is the case with several resorts under construction. Seeing them can be dispiriting; the promise of relaxation, fun, serenity—whatever one's particular tastes—is undermined by seemingly brutal slashes and gashes in the landscape, the terrain literally stripped of personality. At one hotel, experiencing the cutting edge meant that the drive from the front desk to my suite wandered through a seeming hard hat zone, between fences blocking construction views. Right now, though, St. Lucia needs economic development. The challenge—the contours of which are visible as you travel around—is to manage the opportunities without taming or losing the wildness that makes the country so appealing.
All of a sudden, the oracle is whis-pering the name of St. Lucia. The island called the Helen of the West Indies was fought over by the French and the English for 150 years, until 1814, when British possession was confirmed; in the last ten years, the number of U.S. visitors has grown by fifty-four percent. Even the security guard checking my boarding pass at JFK knows this. "St. Lucia," he said and nodded appreciatively. Then he looked at me and said, "I hear that's some kind of paradise." And this is only the beginning: Everyone seems to have heard the same thing.
In the '60s, it was St. John; in the '80s, it was St. Barts. Today, it's St. Lucia. Clearly, the Pitons, gros and petit, both extraordinary, are part of it: In 2004, they were officially recognized as part of our UN-designated world heritage, and the following May Oprah named them number one on her list of the top five places to see in one's lifetime. As usual, there's no arguing with Oprah; she's much too sensible. And more broadly than the Pitons, nature here is extravagant and lush. At a time when vacations spent flat out lying in the sun are diminishing in popularity, St. Lucia is multi-sport heaven—sail one day and hike the next, snorkel, explore ancient petroglyphs, stand under a waterfall, ride horses, mountain bike, shop for batiks and jewelry, play tennis, kayak, and go to the beach in between.
The island, which looks like a fat dark-green poblano pepper dropped upside down in the middle of the Caribbean, is rugged and volcanic, vivid with rain forest, cascades, gorges, and fertile valleys. One of the first things you notice is how the island's perspective is all vertical—the hills are high sharp thrusts, the hotels climb the hillsides, in the car or on hikes and bike rides you go up and then down. The coast is squiggly with bays and harbors and coves, beaches of black and yellow sands framing small rivers that run into the sea between cliffs and hills. Indeed, the intensity of the landscape forces engagement; unlike on flat open islands, where your mind can go on vacation, St. Lucia makes you think about its depths and want to learn the secrets of its history.
The island's most important towns—including Soufrière, the capital under French rule, and Castries, the capital today—as well as its best harbors and many of its spare and lovely fishing villages, are on the west, or Caribbean, side. The center of the island is not only mountainous but thick with rain forest; it has always seemed close to impenetrable. Until the creation of passable roads, getting around the island was easiest by sea; even today, water taxis are as common as any other mode of transportation. The first main road, built in 1786, was described sixty years later as the only useful one on the island. Road construction here is challenging and expensive because of the terrain and the rain; it still takes a long time to drive on the roads connecting east and west, north and south, which only started to appear in the 1960s.
Development, too, tends to hug the coast, where the topography provides lots of privacy in addition to extraordinary views. An explosion of foreigners building and buying second homes opened the tourism market, according to the minister of tourism (and hotelier and chair of the Caribbean Tourism Organization), Allen Chastanet. The hotel companies seem to think it's definitely St. Lucia's moment. Resorts from Ritz-Carlton, Raffles, and Westin, scattered around the coast, are currently under construction, as are a number of smaller projects—for instance Cap Maison, a cluster of cushy Spanish-style villas at the northern tip of the island that's opening this month. Until recently, tourism focused on St. Lucia's northwest, above Castries, which has a port that accommodates cruise ships. Reduit Beach helped Rodney Bay become a lively tourism-driven village with a mall, a string of good restaurants and places to have a drink while watching the sunset, and numerous hotels, from Rex Resorts to Chastanet's own Coco Palm and Coco Kreole (he has stepped down from their management) to sleep it off. Land was filled in between Rodney Bay and Pigeon Island in 1970, creating a long strand with a number of hotels, where now RockResorts has opened The Landings, a high-end resort/condo complex.
I had hoped to sit down with Chastanet in person, but he (and practically everyone else I spoke with) was too busy preparing for the arrival of Prince Charles. Word was that Camilla was on Antigua and that the prince was joining her for a bit of a Caribbean tour and, one hopes, a little holiday R and R. I so sympathize with the difficulties of multitasking travel, combining work and vacation! And I can only imagine the nightmare of hosting royalty, when everything really must be just so.
Chastanet's ambitions range from moving the container depot out of Castries to reorienting the waterfronts of the island's nine fishing villages so as to encourage more visitors to hang out there. He told me, when we chatted by phone, that at least three golf courses and 1,500 rooms are under construction, to add to the current inventory of 4,800. When I suggested that some of the recent projects I'd seen seemed somewhat weak on environmental responsibility, Chastanet said, "We're learning as we go." Current environmental guidelines mandate density of no more than three hundred rooms and a hundred villas per thousand acres. And, he said, they are continuously upgrading the rules. Sustainability, he acknowledged, is very important.
Driving up and down the island's main highway, it's easy to see the allure. The views are all knockouts—dramatic, intense, instantaneous. I dip down into the heart of Choiseul, a small town between two mountains, and see that there's a church by the beach in the small harbor—but before I can take a second look, I'm heading up and out again. Since the car and I are dancing such tight do-si-dos with the road, twisting around to see where I've been seems unwise. Choiseul, the church—it's gone before you know it.
Then, approaching Soufrière from the south, there's a turnout. I am on the top of a ridge, where I can stop both to catch my breath and to inhale the view. The vertiginous beauty of the place is exhilarating. I look down into the basin of Soufrière, which from up here seems more like a postcard of Caribbean splendor than a real place. The boats are moving on the glistening water, there's traffic off the beach and hubbub in the town and—up, up the hill on the other side—houses, trees, and then Jade Mountain. From across the bay, the resort looks jarring, like a multilevel parking garage stacked against the hillside.
The southwestern corner of St. Lucia was designed by the Qualibou caldera 35,000 years ago. Though dormant, the volcano still spits gray boiling water and sulfurous gas out of a scattering of pools of bubbling mud and cracks in the earth's crust. The original French commander, with the blessing of Louis XVI, built baths here to soothe the aches and pains of his soldiers. Chastanet would like to pick up on that idea: He dreams of a high-end spa putting the same to good use. But this attraction is the least of the volcano's gifts. The caldera, which stretches two by three miles, is what gave St. Lucia the Pitons as well as the eighteenth-century town of Soufrière and its bay.
"The improving little town of Soufrière," wrote Henry Breen in 1844, in his history of the island, St. Lucia: Historical, Statistical, Descriptive, is "unrivalled for the beauty and diversity of its tropical scenery." His description stands, despite the town's being a bit down at heel. There is still wooden French colonial architecture, ramshackle though it may be, and painted fishing boats pulled up on the beach; and the town feels local, with markets, shops, and offices keeping things running. There is much boat traffic, again largely local. Everyone on the street—seemingly everyone who lives on the island—speaks Kwéyòl, which sounds just like French even if it doesn't look like it. There is a sense that grimy Soufrière is like Cinderella—overlooked and waiting for a wand to be waved in her direction.
Jimmy Haynes has an office on the Soufrière waterfront that he shares with the town tourism bureau. Among his projects, Jimmy not only sits on the Soufrière Regional Development Foundation but owns and runs Gros Piton Tours, based in the village of Fond Gens Libre, at the foot of Gros Piton itself. He is eager to spruce up Soufrière as well as to bring tourism to the surrounding communities. Slim and bookish, he has an earnest, thoughtful manner, which is somewhat belied by his carrying three different cell phones, all of which require fairly frequent consultation. On the day we met, it was pouring. The prince and Camilla were still on their yacht out in the harbor, no doubt hoping along with everyone onshore for a break in the weather. Jimmy raced off to look for umbrellas while I stood with the crowd awaiting the royals. Greeters dressed in official-looking attire (such as band and police uniforms) and I squeezed under the eaves of the buildings lining the harbor. Initially the hope had been that the royal couple would spend the night, but things had just become too tight; they were only going to be able to stay for a quick visit. Jimmy returned and we scooted off to find the car.
Fond Gens Libre, or Base of the Free People, is where Jimmy's father was born and grew up. It is at the end of a long dirt road, across a couple of streams, past an old cacao plantation, around a bend, through mango trees and coffee bushes. As with so many other places I visited in St. Lucia, in the village you could either go up—which in this case meant climbing the strikingly steep Gros Piton (2,619 feet)—or go down, which led to the L'Ivrogne River that runs through a verdant ravine below the village and out to a small sand beach and the sea below. Across the ravine is the Carib village of La Pointe, the home of Jimmy's mother. The Caribs antedated the colonialists and the slaves, having migrated up the Caribbean islands from the Orinoco River basin in South America. This young couple fell in love and married despite their different backgrounds; they moved to London in search of work, where Jimmy was born. The family moved back to the island when Jimmy was ten, and Fond Gens Libre has played a big role in Jimmy's sense of himself ever since.
The interpretive center of Gros Piton Tours is here in Fond Gens Libre, where Jimmy and his cohorts have mounted exhibits about the mountain, the village and its history, and the local plants, rocks, fruits, and animals and their many practical and medicinal uses. The guides, who all live in the village, lead hikers not only up the piton but along other trails in the mountains and rain forests. Next door, they have all cleared and constructed a space where concerts can be staged and refreshments served. A half-dozen young guys are building additional Carib structures of wood and thatch. The goal of all of these projects is to encourage a resurgence of interest in traditional crafts that will support the inhabitants culturally and financially.
The name of the village hints at the history of St. Lucia, at the wars between the English and the French, and also at the slaves and runaways (called Nèg Mawons), the free blacks and the Caribs, who formed a ragtag but capable guerrilla army and whose role in the culture of St. Lucia is still being uncovered. This was an outpost of those who were waging their own war for freedom as the Europeans vied for dominance in the Caribbean. The Brigands War, as it was called, lasted from 1794 to 1798. In some ways it was an echo of the French Revolution, when black St. Lucians believed they had a reasonable hope of defeating slavery.
By February 1794, the French had been in possession of St. Lucia for thirteen years, Louis XVI had been beheaded, and the Republic had declared slavery abolished in the French Antilles. The settlement at Fond Gens Libre already existed, if it was not yet known by that name.
The freedom fighters' victory was not to last. In 1796, the British took control of the island, this time more or less for good. The British reimposed slavery (as did the French elsewhere in the Caribbean) for another forty years. And some people remained in the woods.
Jimmy told me that for a long time people were ashamed to come from Fond Gens Libre or other Brigand strongholds and felt tainted by association with the uneducated, violent rebels. Their history was recounted as a story of defeat and humiliation. Only recently has the narrative started to change as historians and archaeologists search out records not just in European archives but in the caves, tunnels, and ovens hidden throughout the infinite nooks and crannies of St. Lucia, places with descriptive Kwéyòl names like Wavin Konba ("Battle Ravine"), Kan Bwigan ("Brigands Camp"), and Ba Kan Nèg Mawon ("Runaways Camp").
Even after the British took control of St. Lucia, the French legal system remained in place for another thirty years. The French also continued to influence the culture through religion (the population is ninety percent Catholic) and education (the Church has run St. Mary's and St. Joseph's, the island's top schools for children of the elite, for more than a century). In subtle ways, conflict between British and French culture remains. There is a feeling among some that British resentment of the French led to spots with heavy French culture, such as Soufrière, being ignored. The clash is most evident in traditional social attitudes about language. Before British rule, people of all classes spoke patois and the middle and upper classes spoke French. But once English was established as the official language, speaking Kwéyòl became déclassé and the basis for social discrimination, particularly for the twenty percent of the population who could not speak English. Perhaps this, too, is starting to change: In a bookstore in Rodney Bay, I found both a dictionary and a language guide for Kwéyòl; more important, the language can now be used in the national legislature.
The original Soufrière estate was a grant of two thousand acres in 1713 by Louis XIV to the Devaux family, three brothers from Normandy, who planted sugar, cacao, tobacco, and cotton. In 1963, Kirby Lamontagne bought part of it, which became Fond Doux, a working cacao plantation that today also has a restaurant, a swimming pool, and cottages for overnight guests. It is one of a number of old estates and plantations in St. Lucia that are being run by people interested in tourism, conservation, and agriculture. Some of the Devaux land became the Rabot Estate, which was recently bought by some enterprising Englishmen in the luxury chocolate business and renamed, like their business, Hotel Chocolat. Committed to socially responsible chocolate, they had invited HRH to help them break ground for their new factory. (Despite the name, theirs is not a hotel business—although they do plan to add some rooms for visiting chocoholics.)
I had spent the night at Fond Doux when I first arrived in St. Lucia. It is atmospheric with a great sense of history. In addition to preserving the traditional way of making cacao, Lyton and Eroline Lamontagne, the proprietors, collect old gingerbread-festooned plantation cottages from around the island; refurbished, these are tucked into the greenery and made ready for guests. The effect is peaceful and serene country living—nothing superfancy but all a body really needs to be comfortable and relax. There are roses growing next to bananas next to red and pink ginger flowers and ginger lilies next to breadfruit next to white and yellow flowers called bread and cheese next to Indian almond and so on and so on really without end. The plantation's cacao seeds are fermented in a barnlike structure that seems to have been there forever. The process is the same as it ever was: The seeds are spread out on great rolling trays that are pulled out from under the sides of the building so they can be cured by the sun or pushed back under and covered in case of rain. Next, they are crushed and pounded, then molded into sticks of ground cocoa.
At the end of my day with Jimmy, we stopped again at Fond Doux, where I had accidentally left my nightie. We arrived just after Charles and Camilla had left. The Lamontagnes, charming, talented, and elegant, were in the flush of having hosted a good visit, still clearly excited but also just as clearly thrilled that it was over. Several other friends had dropped in to celebrate. Lyton invited Jimmy and me to join them. A balmy evening followed as we sat outdoors in the bar, sipping rum party drinks. Meeting people one likes and would like to be friends with is some sort of apex of travel. There's enough that's shared that the world seems possible and enough that's different that the world seems interesting.
So the question becomes, how to make a moment last? Conversation quickly turns to sustainability. From Soufrière, I traveled up to the north of the island to visit another new friend. Molly McDaniel is a New Zealand-raised journalist and environmentalist whom I've met several times in New York but who has been living in St. Lucia for the last fifteen years. Four years ago, she produced one of my favorite books about St. Lucia, a photo portfolio called T_he Land, the People, the Light,_ for which she wrote profiles of some of St. Lucia's extraordinary citizens (the Lamontagnes among them).
We hike up to the ruins of the old fort in Pigeon Island National Park, which played a strategic role in the battles for control of St. Lucia. After climbing the sun-baked hill with views of neighboring Martinique and northwestern St. Lucia, we went down for lunch at Jambe de Bois, a waterside café. The sister of the owner was a friend of Molly's; she was shot a couple of years ago, her killer never found, probably related to a land dispute—the antithesis of sustainability. The sums that some people are being offered for land held in their families for generations are staggering and hard to resist. Everyone wants to take advantage of the possibilities but without selling out their children's future. Trust is an issue in a place with such a tangled history. Jimmy, whose land offers views of the sea from a high meadow, tells me that he's felt the temptation of, literally, millions of dollars.
Molly takes me to hang out on her favorite beach, which is on the windswept east coast. Like all of the beaches in St. Lucia, this one is public. But the easiest way to get there is to drive across Sylvina and Claudius Louisy's land. They charge five East Caribbean dollars for the privilege, so the beach is familiarly called Five Dollar Beach. The land is spare, with only an unpretentious wood dwelling atop a bluff and a chair placed at the edge overlooking the Atlantic. The wind on this side of the island is a constant, as evidenced by the trees, which have flattened themselves against the hillsides as if they were sunbathers, all spreading out in the same direction to catch the rays. On top of the bluff across the bay is the land that's been stripped in preparation for the Raffles resort. Down on the beach, the feeling is clean and wild—the water shallow but riffled with lots of little waves coming in over the tawny sand. It was a workday; no one else was there. The thing about an exquisite moment is that you never know when or where it's going to happen.