St. Lucia: Peak attractions

By Dave Herndon

updated 5:10 p.m. ET Aug. 2, 2005

Balmy nostalgia, with a lightning flash of dread. That’s my emotional weather report from aboard the taxi boat as we slowly motor into the pier at Soufrière, the old-fashioned fishing village on St. Lucia’s lower west side.

The nostalgia comes from my fondness for this neighborhood, a lasting souvenir of a brief visit nearly a decade ago. I’ve been privileged to visit many of the world’s garden spots, but nowhere have I encountered such a ripe concatenation of spectacular ingredients for nature travel. This is a place where you can really feel the pulse of the planet as a living, breathing, astonishingly diverse organism: an opulent reef meets a florid rain forest meets a simmering volcano meets a pair of Pitons — those famous, freakish sharktooth mountain spires that shoot 2,500 feet above sea level (and another thousand below). 

I’m also nostalgic for a mostly imagined old Caribbean, before the days when people like us could easily get here in a day from Philadelphia or Atlanta or London. Soufrière represents that era, as the most significant of a string of coastal bay towns whose French Creole provenance endures despite Napoleon’s surrender of the island to Britain and the depredations of time and weather on fragile Victorian-era wooden architecture. (The reef and the Pitons are well-protected, but these villages ache for preservation.) Cocoa and palm plantations in various stages of working order, and the evocative stone ruins of mills and battlements found on them, sketch a portrait of life as lived in that bygone age.

I recall, too, Soufrière’s gracious hospitality scene, anchored by a few boutique hotels that know how to broker your relationship to all this — mainly by settling you in consummate comfort and waking you with birdsong and the jaw-dropping spectacle of the Pitons being gradually revealed as morning sunlight unfurls around them.

Debbie Snow / Caribbean Travel & Life

The flash of dread I suffer on the way in comes from a concern that since I’d last visited, this delicate balance of nature, history, culture and hospitality might have been spoiled, perhaps by an act of God or the introduction of something like an all-intrusive hotel-casino or an oversized pier with duty-free shopping malls. Stuff happens, even to our favorite places. But before the boat docks, it’s plain to see that though the bay’s profile has been altered some by both God and man, the scene, quickly scanned as a panoramic whole, retains its essential proportions.

So I experience a flush of relief, tinged with eagerness: Now I get to spend a few days exploring this remarkable precinct once again, and give my nostalgia-fogged recollections an up-to-date reality check.

Slideshow   Caribbean way of life From chic to rustic, expensive to affordable, tourists looking for some sun and sand can find what they're looking for in the Caribbean. more photos

Begin with lunch at Bang, a seaside restaurant named for its location smack between the lava domes Gros Piton and Petit Piton. It’s roughly at the heart of the Pitons Management Area, which last year was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List on account of its rare volcanic topography. Our host is the legendary Colin Tennant, aka Lord Glenconner, aka The Man Who Bought Mustique, an island he personally developed from the ground up into a getaway for the ultrafabulous. Along the way, Mr. Tennant (as he is known locally) has cultivated a reputation as an eccentric nonpareil. He appears dressed the part of the pancolonialist, with a three-quarters length muslin tunic that harks back to the Raj topped by a planter’s straw hat that shades fragile-looking 79-year-old skin and soft blue eyes.

Tennant relocated here in the late ’80s, after things went sour for him on Mustique.

Holding court at a table heavy with jerk chicken and fish and fresh vegetables, he explains that he had retained just enough of the family fortune to purchase this former cocoa and coconut plantation (“the noblest and finest estate in the West Indies,” he says), which he is trying to develop into another enclave for the super-rich — the exact same kind of high-maintenance people he claims he was trying to get away from on Mustique.

During the luncheon, Tennant expounds on a host of subjects pertaining to the Caribbean, past and present, and to his own career as a flamboyant player on that stage. After serving a gorgeous Bajan coconut cream pie piled high with meringue, he conducts a tour of one of the four villas he’s built so far. It’s a six-bedroom palace with a moat of a split-level pool; it rents out for $12,000 a week. But apparently Mr. Tennant is having trouble finding takers for the other 16 homes he plans to build, and he expresses frustration that the “right sort of people” remain unaware that this part of St. Lucia is a pristine, world-class destination.

Bang represents a beachhead for Tennant’s Beau Estate development and a venue for his dual passions of collecting and entertaining. The bar-restaurant-dancehall mini-compound is composed of fine traditional Creole gingerbread (“it’s fleur in patois,” he interjects) buildings he’s found and brought here to be rescued from obsolescence; he bemoans the tendency of St. Lucians not to maintain the old wooden structures that are their legacy and laments that new ones are built with less expensive materials. Soufrière, he says, is collapsing, and he’s one voice among many expressing horror at the construction in the town center of multi-story mixed-use buildings that are utterly out of scale and destructive of the town’s traditional Creole Victorian character.

At the farewell, Tennant apologizes for “rattling on” and wishes me well on my reconnaissance of the area. “There’s lots to do. It’s undefined,” he says. “There’s an exoticness.”

Compared to more posh, more famous resort hotels like Ladera and Anse Chastanet, which hit you with lots of wow-factor in terms of design and décor, Stonefield Estate Villa Resort is homey. That is, if your home is a cocoa plantation in a tropical paradise and your father a very clever engineer who liked to build airy guest cottages around his 27 acres of flower- and fruit-covered property.  Such was the case for Aly Brown, 33, who took  charge of the family business in recent years, increased the number of cottages to 16 and plans to add eight more this year before calling a halt to expansion.

MORE FROM CARIBBEAN TRAVEL

Caribbean Travel Section Front

The Caribbean's 'Nature Island' 7 Caribbean diving classics Cuba not ready, but expecting U.S. tourists The Caribbean’s new ‘it’ destination Hottest Caribbean hotels The 6 best authentic Caribbean all-inclusives A tale of two sisters Summing up the seasons The Caribbean's exotic indulgences Island for two: Honeymoon on Nevis Caribbean Travel Section Front   Add Caribbean Travel headlines to your news reader: