The Caribbean Arc

Saint Kitts grew sugar for three hundred years, and Brimstone Hill Fortress is what that wealth was worth defending. The UNESCO-listed fort sits 220 metres up, its cannon still aimed out over the Caribbean Sea, and it's the best place to understand the shape of this narrow volcanic island. Basseterre, the capital, takes an afternoon on foot: the Circus roundabout, the Georgian buildings along the waterfront, the National Museum. Dinner is down by the harbour, with Nevis Peak across the water.

A morning flight goes north first, to Sint Maarten, the Dutch side of an island shared by two European countries. The stop is for Maho Beach. It sits at the very end of Princess Juliana airport's runway, so landing aircraft pass a few metres over the fence and departing jets blast sunbathers across the sand. Loud, silly and oddly compelling. An afternoon connection takes us on to Antigua. (Whether we route through Sint Maarten depends on flight connections.)

The early boat out to Barbuda and the evening one back give us the whole day on the least developed coast in the Eastern Caribbean. Fewer than 2,000 people live here and there are no high-rises; the beaches are miles of pale pink sand with nobody selling anything and, most of the time, nobody else on them. Codrington Lagoon has the largest frigatebird colony in the Western Hemisphere, several thousand birds nesting in the mangroves. We sleep on Antigua again.

Antigua's best morning is at English Harbour. Nelson's Dockyard was a Georgian naval base and is still the only Georgian dockyard in the world in working use, and from Shirley Heights above it you can look across to Montserrat and Guadeloupe. In the afternoon a short flight runs south to Dominica. The plane comes in past steep, dark-green ridges, and from the window it's obvious this island is built differently from the last two.

The Nature Isle nickname is earned. The morning starts at Trafalgar Falls, two falls side by side fed by different volcanic springs, one cool and one warm, then the Titou Gorge, a narrow slot canyon you enter by swimming. The hard option is the Boiling Lake: six to eight hours through the Valley of Desolation to the world's second-largest boiling lake, and one of the great walks in the Caribbean. If that's not for you, the Emerald Pool, Titou Gorge and a riverside lunch make a good day on their own.

Saint Lucia is a morning flight south. Its Pitons, two volcanic spires standing straight up from the sea below Soufrière, are what most people picture when they hear the name. The afternoon belongs to the other end of the island, Pigeon Island National Park: pirates used it, then the British navy, and from the restored fortifications you can see Martinique. The last hours go to a quiet beach on the west coast.

A short flight east and the ground itself changes. Barbados is coral, not volcanic, and flat by Caribbean standards; for three centuries it was the British Caribbean's most valuable island, and it still has a settled, comfortable feel. The afternoon is for Bridgetown on foot: the Garrison Historic Area, the colonnades of Broad Street, and a rum shop or two, which is where Bajans actually meet. On a Friday or Saturday the evening goes to the Oistins Fish Fry.

A whole day on Barbados. On the Atlantic side, around Bathsheba and the Scotland District, the swell arrives with nothing between it and Africa and the sea turns a different colour from the sheltered Caribbean coast. This isn't the Barbados of the brochures, and it's the part people talk about afterwards. Harrison's Cave is a kilometre of white stalactites seen from an electric tram. The Barbados Museum fills the old military prison and tells the plantation story, including Bussa's rebellion of 1816.

A morning flight west to Saint Vincent, the island at the head of the Grenadines and one of the least visited in the Eastern Caribbean. La Soufrière, at its northern end, is the most recently active volcano in the arc: the April 2021 eruption forced the whole northern half to evacuate. Kingstown is a working port, not a showpiece. It has a covered market, a botanical garden that claims to be the oldest in the Western Hemisphere, and a Victorian cathedral whose decoration is the work of a self-taught Vincentian artist.

The morning ferry takes an hour south to Bequia, the largest of the Grenadines: white wooden houses, boatyards and fishing boats, on an island that has been building Caribbean boats for longer than anyone can say for certain. The harbour at Port Elizabeth is a calm anchorage lined with rum bars and one of the nicest places in the Eastern Caribbean to sit and watch the water. We fly on to Grenada in the evening.

The Spice Isle label is literal here. Nutmeg and mace grow in Grenada's volcanic interior, and the island supplies a significant share of the world's crop. St. George's regularly gets called the prettiest town in the Caribbean, and it's hard to argue: painted houses climb the hills around a horseshoe harbour, with eighteenth-century Fort George on the headland. The rest of the day covers the Grand Etang crater lake, the nutmeg and chocolate cooperatives at Gouyave, and the Underwater Sculpture Park in Molinière Bay, where life-size figures stand on the seabed.

An early flight to Port of Spain connects on to Tobago. The two islands are one country, but they don't feel it: Tobago is smaller, quieter and geologically older, and its interior is the oldest protected rainforest in the Western Hemisphere. Supper is crab and dumplings from one of the shacks on Store Bay, eaten at a plastic table as the fishing boats come in.

A last morning on Tobago, then the short flight back to Port of Spain, which feels like a different region from where the trip began. Hindu temples and mosques stand alongside churches and rum distilleries, the Magnificent Seven Victorian buildings line the Savannah, and doubles vendors have their carts out at every junction before it's light. Trinidad also holds the Pitch Lake at La Brea, forty hectares of natural asphalt and the largest such lake on Earth. If you're carrying on, Georgetown is a short flight away and our ten-day Three Guianas expedition starts there.