Seven days on an island 43 kilometres long, run north to south down the leeward side — Castries and the fort on the ridge above it, the causeway island Admiral Rodney watched the French from, the fishing villages on the west coast road, then Soufrière: a negotiated marine reserve you can dive, a volcanic centre you drive into, a lava dome you climb with a guide from a village founded by escaped slaves, and the rainforest behind it. Ends on the dry south coast at the airport most people arrive at.
Castries
The capital burned down repeatedly — the fires of 1927 and 1948 took most of it — which is why almost nothing here looks colonial and why the cathedral, which survived, matters more than it otherwise would. Inside, Dunstan St Omer painted the walls and the altarpiece with Black saints in the 1980s; he is also the man who designed the flag. Derek Walcott Square outside holds a samaan tree older than the town around it, and Walcott and Sir Arthur Lewis, a Nobel laureate each, were both born within a few streets of it. Then the market on Jeremie Street, and up Morne Fortune for the batteries, the Inniskilling monument and the view down onto the harbour.
The north and Pigeon Island
Pigeon Island was an island until 1972, when the spoil dredged out of Rodney Bay to make the marina was used to build a causeway to it. Walk up to Fort Rodney: this is the ridge from which the Royal Navy watched for the French fleet at Fort Royal, now Fort-de-France, some sixty kilometres north — Martinique itself is barely thirty across the channel and visible from here on a clear day. Rodney sailed from this anchorage to the Battle of the Saintes in April 1782. The two-gun battery, the officers' mess and the ruined barracks are all still legible. Afterwards Reduit beach, and Gros Islet on a Friday night, which has had a street party every week since the 1980s and is worth taking on its own terms rather than as a show.
Down the west coast to Soufrière
Thirty-five kilometres and an hour and a half, because the road is a sequence of ridges and ravines and almost none of it is straight. Marigot Bay first — a deep inlet the British are said to have hidden a squadron in behind the palms — then Anse La Raye and Canaries, two fishing villages the coast road runs straight through. Stop at the Anse La Raye seafood street on a Friday evening if the timing works. The Pitons come into view on the last descent and the town of Soufrière sits between them and the sea, a working place with a fishing beach, not a resort.
The marine reserve
Eleven kilometres of this coast were carved into zones in 1994 after two years of negotiation between fishers, dive operators, hotels and the fisheries department — marine reserves, fishing priority areas, mooring areas and multiple-use water, each with a boundary agreed rather than imposed. Dive or snorkel at Anse Chastanet and Anse Mamin, where the reef starts a few metres off the sand and drops away, and at the wall under Petit Piton. Boats moor on fixed buoys because anchoring in the reserve is what the whole argument started over. The user fee on your dive ticket pays the wardens.
Gros Piton, and the springs
Start early. The trail begins at Fond Gens Libre — the valley of the free people, settled by those who escaped the estates and held out in this ground during the Brigands' War of the 1790s — and a local guide is compulsory, which in this case is a licensing arrangement that pays the village rather than a formality. Roughly two hours up 771 metres of steps, roots and rock, and an hour and a half back down. In the afternoon, the Sulphur Springs: a collapsed volcanic crater you drive into, with fumaroles and boiling grey pools. You look at it from a platform because the crust is not reliably thick, as a guide who fell through it found out.
The rainforest, and across to the south
Up the valley to Fond St Jacques and into the Edmund Forest Reserve. The Saint Lucia parrot — the jacquot, on the coat of arms, found nowhere else — was down to something like a hundred birds by the late 1970s after decades of shooting and trapping; protective legislation, a national campaign built around the bird and the forest reserves brought it back over a thousand, and recent counts suggest it has levelled off there rather than kept climbing. This is where you have a real chance of hearing one, which is not the same as seeing one. The through-trail to Des Cartiers on the eastern side needs a Forestry Department permit and a vehicle waiting at the far end. Then out over the interior and down to the south coast for the last night.
The south coast and the Maria Islands
The driest corner of the island and the one nobody photographs. Two small islands off Anse de Sables hold the Saint Lucia racer and the zandoli te, a ground lizard found on nothing else on earth; the National Trust runs the boat, the reserve closes for the seabird nesting season in early summer, and you cannot land without them. Otherwise: the windward beach at Anse de Sables, which is where the kitesurfers are because the Atlantic trade wind lands here first, Vieux Fort town, and the craft workshops at Choiseul on the way back. Hewanorra airport is ten minutes from all of it.
Good to know
British, EU, US, Canadian, Australian and CARICOM passport holders need no visa; the stay is decided at the desk and six weeks is the usual stamp. The currency is the East Caribbean dollar, pegged at EC$2.70 to US$1 since 1976 and shared with seven other territories, so a rate materially worse than that is somebody taking a cut — US dollars are accepted almost everywhere and your change comes back in EC. Cards work in hotels, supermarkets and dive shops; minibuses, the market, roadside vendors and most guides are cash. There are two airports and the difference matters: nearly all long-haul flights land at Hewanorra in Vieux Fort at the southern tip, which is an hour and a half from the north of the island by road, while George F. L. Charles in Castries takes regional traffic only. This route pays that transfer once, on the arrival day, and then works its way back down the island so that the last drive to the airport is the itinerary rather than a transfer. What you should not do is base yourself in the north for the whole week and day-trip to Soufrière: that is three hours in the car for an afternoon in the town. Driving is on the left and you need a temporary local permit, which the hire company issues on the spot against your own licence for a few tens of EC dollars. The west coast road is the real constraint on any itinerary here: it is properly surfaced but it climbs and drops continuously with blind bends and no shoulder, and 35 kilometres from Castries to Soufrière takes an hour and a half, closer to two with stops, so plan in hours rather than distances. Minibuses run frequently and cheaply on the main corridors, but they leave when full rather than to a timetable, they thin out badly on Sundays, and after dark there is effectively nothing outside the Castries–Gros Islet route — a night out in Soufrière without a car means arranging the way back before you go. Water taxis along the leeward coast are a genuine alternative to driving and often faster. Tap water in Castries, the north and the main southern towns comes from a treated public supply and is drinkable; the caveat is reliability rather than quality, because the John Compton dam at Roseau silted heavily after Hurricane Tomas in 2010 and rationing during dry spells is routine, so your guesthouse will have a tank. Tomas is also the reference point for the season: it crossed on 30 October 2010, killed fourteen people, destroyed the banana crop and cut roads and water supply for weeks, and it arrived at the tail of a hurricane season that officially runs from 1 June to 30 November. September and October are the peak of it. Inside the Soufrière Marine Management Area the rules are enforced by wardens on the water and are not negotiable: no fishing or collecting in the reserve zones, no anchoring anywhere on the reef, moorings only, and a user fee collected through your dive shop or yacht agent that funds the patrols. Gros Piton requires a licensed guide from Fond Gens Libre and the Sulphur Springs are viewed on the guided platform circuit — neither is optional and neither is a scam. The Maria Islands reserve is closed during the seabird nesting season, roughly mid-May to the end of July, and access at any time is by Saint Lucia National Trust boat only. The Atlantic side of the island gets sargassum inundations in most years, worst between about March and August, which can make the east and south coast beaches unusable and smell strongly as it rots — it is a regional phenomenon and no forecast is reliable more than a week or two out. Soufrière has a persistent unofficial-guide economy around the jetty and the springs; agree a price before anything begins and there is rarely a problem after that. Saint Lucia has one of the higher homicide rates in the Caribbean and record years have run past seventy killings in a population under 200,000 — a rate several times the European average. That figure is worth stating plainly and then reading correctly: it is overwhelmingly disputes between people who know each other, concentrated in a handful of communities around Castries that this route does not enter, and it is not what happens to visitors. What happens to visitors is opportunistic theft. Castries empties after office hours and unlit beaches anywhere on the island are the specific place people get robbed, so take a taxi at night — it is cheap and it settles the question. Kwéyòl is the everyday language beside English and Jounen Kwéyòl, on the last Sunday of October, is the day the whole island speaks it in public; Carnival moved to July in 1999 and prices move with it.
Shorter or longer?
L'Express des Îles has long run north from Castries to Fort-de-France in Martinique and on towards Dominica and Guadeloupe — the only scheduled sea link Saint Lucia has, and the Saint Lucia leg has come and gone over the years, so confirm it is sailing before you build a plan on it. Four or five more days gets you Dominica, which is the same volcanic arc with a great deal more rain on it and a 184-kilometre trail up the spine.
Fly into Hewanorra and drive straight to Soufrière. The marine reserve, Gros Piton and the springs, the Edmund forest, and one day on the south coast. Cuts Castries, the north and the west coast road entirely, which also removes the two longest drives on the route.