A Volcano and Thirty Islands
La Soufrière erupted explosively in 2021, in 1979 and in 1902 — and in 2021 nobody died, because the evacuation came before the explosion. South of it runs a chain of thirty islands, and from this one the Garifuna were deported in 1797 to a coast where their descendants still speak the language.
La Soufrière stands at 1,234 metres at the northern end of Saint Vincent, and on 9 April 2021 it began a series of explosive eruptions that continued for two weeks, sending ash columns into the stratosphere and covering the northern third of the island in a grey layer that flattened crops and killed livestock. Around twenty thousand people were evacuated from the red zone. Nobody died, which was the result of a functioning monitoring system and an evacuation ordered before the explosion rather than after.
The volcano had done it before, and worse. The 1902 eruption killed over a thousand people on the same day that Mont Pelée destroyed Saint-Pierre on Martinique. The 1979 eruption emptied the north again. Saint Vincent’s relationship with its mountain is old, specific, and rehearsed.
Two very different halves
The country is Saint Vincent — volcanic, steep, green, agricultural, with almost all of the population — plus the Grenadines, a chain of some thirty small islands and cays running south toward Grenada that are flat, dry, sandy and, in a couple of cases, extremely expensive.
The contrast is the whole national economy. Saint Vincent grows things: bananas historically, now arrowroot, root crops, and a great deal of what feeds the region. The Grenadines are a yachting destination of international standing, and the sailing between them — short hops, reliable trade winds, protected anchorages — is regarded by people who do this seriously as among the best cruising grounds in the world.
Bequia, the largest of them, is a boat-building island with a whaling tradition that survives under an International Whaling Commission aboriginal subsistence quota of a very small number of humpbacks a year, taken from open sailing boats with hand harpoons. It is contentious internationally and defended locally as a cultural practice conducted at a scale that has no population effect. Both positions get argued in the harbour bars at Port Elizabeth.
Mustique is the private one — an island owned by a company of homeowners, with a controlled visitor policy and a guest list that has kept the tabloids employed since the 1960s. Canouan has followed a similar model more recently. Union Island and Mayreau are the working ones, and the Tobago Cays are the reason people sail here at all: five uninhabited islands inside a horseshoe reef, a marine park with green turtles grazing seagrass in water you can stand in.
The people who were deported
Saint Vincent holds the origin of a diaspora that stretches along the Central American coast, and it is one of the more remarkable stories in the region.
The island was Kalinago territory and remained so for longer than almost anywhere in the Lesser Antilles, defended by terrain and by treaty. Africans who escaped or were shipwrecked intermarried with the Kalinago over generations, producing a population the British called Black Caribs and who called themselves Garifuna.
They fought two wars against British attempts to take the island. In the second, ending in 1796 after the death of the paramount chief Joseph Chatoyer — now Saint Vincent’s national hero — they were defeated, and the British deported the survivors: some five thousand people were held on the island of Baliceaux, where roughly half died, and the remainder were shipped to Roatán off Honduras in 1797.
From there they spread along the Caribbean coast of Central America, and the Garifuna communities of Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua all descend from that deportation. Their language, music and dance are inscribed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.
A people were removed from an island in 1797 and are now spread across four countries, still speaking the language, still counting Saint Vincent as home.
Return visits are a real phenomenon — Garifuna from Central America come to Saint Vincent to see the place, and 14 March is observed as National Heroes Day for Chatoyer. It is one of the very few cases in the Americas of a forced displacement whose descendants maintained continuous identity and returned voluntarily two centuries later.
Living with a volcano
What is genuinely instructive about Saint Vincent is that the 2021 eruption killed nobody, and the reason is a set of arrangements that took a century to build.
La Soufrière is monitored continuously by the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Centre in Trinidad, which watches every volcano in the eastern Caribbean from one facility. In late 2020 the volcano began effusive activity — a lava dome growing in the crater without explosion — which gave months of warning that something was under way and allowed instruments to be added and the population briefed.
When the seismic signature changed in early April 2021, the government ordered evacuation of the red zone the day before the first explosion. Around twenty thousand people moved south. The explosions that followed over the next two weeks would have killed a substantial number of them had they stayed.
The neighbouring islands then did the other half. Saint Lucia, Grenada, Barbados, Antigua and Trinidad took evacuees and sent supplies under CARICOM arrangements, and the Argyle airport handled the traffic. It is the kind of regional cooperation that is invisible until it is needed.
The comparison the region makes is with Montserrat, where the Soufrière Hills eruption from 1995 buried the capital at Plymouth, made the southern two-thirds of the island permanently uninhabitable, and drove most of the population abroad. That island’s exclusion zone is still in force decades later, and it is why nobody in the eastern Caribbean treats a volcano warning as an inconvenience.
The oldest botanic garden
In Kingstown are the Saint Vincent Botanic Gardens, founded in 1765 and generally cited as the oldest botanical garden in the western hemisphere.
They exist for a specific colonial purpose: to trial economically useful plants from elsewhere in the empire for cultivation in the Caribbean. The most famous arrival was breadfruit, brought from Tahiti by William Bligh in 1793 — the second attempt, the first having ended with the mutiny on the Bounty. A tree in the gardens is described as a descendant of that original stock.
The intention was to produce a cheap, high-calorie food to feed enslaved people on the plantations. The enslaved population initially refused to eat it. It is now thoroughly Vincentian, roasted and eaten with fried jackfish, and is on the national dish list.
The gardens also hold a breeding aviary for the Saint Vincent parrot — the national bird, endemic, found in the forested interior valleys, and the subject of a long conservation programme that has brought it back from a very low point.
Going, and what to expect
Argyle International Airport opened on Saint Vincent in 2017 and changed access substantially — before that everything routed through Barbados or Saint Lucia on small planes.
La Soufrière is climbed from either the windward or leeward side, four to five hours up through rainforest and then bare volcanic ground to the crater rim. The 2021 eruption reshaped the summit and the trails were closed for a period; check current access, and go with a guide.
The Falls of Baleine are reached only by boat up the leeward coast. The Vermont Nature Trail is where the parrots are. Dark Sand beaches on the windward side are volcanic and dramatic and not for swimming.
And the Grenadines are reached by ferry from Kingstown — a cheap, slow, entirely local boat that stops at Bequia, Canouan, Mayreau and Union — or by small plane, or on a chartered yacht, which is what most visitors do and which is, unarguably, the way this archipelago is best seen.
Diego is a bogotano journalist who has covered his city’s reinvention for fifteen years — transit, food, altitude and all. He rides Ciclovía every Sunday and will defend ajiaco against all comers.