How to explore Grenada, from rum distilleries to rainforests 

Monkeys, monkeys everywhere. These are Old World mona monkeys — weighing around 11lbs and groomed as if having come from the hair salon. Their body fur is coffee brown, their chipmunk-like cheeks covered in bushy white tufts. Those closest sniff the air, displaying masks of bare skin around their eyes, making them look like miniature Dick Turpins. They act like the highwayman, too. Watchful, hungry and with slim pickpocket fingers, I fear they’re here to rob my lunch.

“The Mona is one of the few monkey species in the Caribbean,” says Jeremy, our guide, as he surveys their gang hideout in the treetops. “They act like they own the place too.” Even eyed from a distance, at the far end of a track through an overgrown canopy, it’s clear they have swagger. Spend a few moments watching them and it feels — briefly — as though they’re policing the rainforest, tails swinging like batons, as we try to lift the veil on their natural world.

The Grenada experience begins from the get-go and, this year, the country is marking its 50th anniversary of independence, after it transitioned from UK rule in February 1974. Five centuries before that, Grenada was first sighted by Christopher Columbus while sailing from Sanlúcar, Spain, on his third Transatlantic voyage to conquer the New World. The Italian named the island Concepción, a hat tip to the Immaculate Conception of Mary, mother of Jesus, but never set foot on its shores. For Columbus, suffering from the relapsing arthritis that is said to eventually have killed him, another week at sea awaited before he instead landed on Hispaniola. For me, landing close to the rolling waves of Grand Anse Beach, it’s a far more straightforward arrival from the airport in a minibus.

Out of all the islands in the Lesser Antilles, Grenada is the near-forgotten speck at the bottom tip of the banana curve. This is a country neglected by most visitors to the region  — compared to big hitters such as St Lucia, Barbados, Antigua and the Virgin Islands  — and it’s a land more reliant on agriculture and export crops like nutmeg and mace than the tourist industry. On first impression, it’s all the better for it. Tourism is still developing at a relatively grassroots level here and it feels distinctly authentic.

We begin our first day on the road to Grand Etang National Park, with the asphalt uncoiling into the island’s volcanic interior and lumpy hills. It’s a glorious autumn morning in the island capital, St George’s: the sun breaking the clouds above the hewn battlements of Fort George is a hymn for the day ahead. The rainforest, meanwhile, is a thick pelt of dense, dark green. It’s a wild place and, as we move from the suburbs past gas storage tanks onto a mountain road, looming bamboo begins to block out the rippling blue sky. There’s no lack of competition. Eucalyptus, teak, gum, guava and rainbow trees creep towards the verges, almost shielding our entry. It’s no prison, but our progress is slow.

The problem is that our minibus, with loose exhaust and coughing engine, doesn’t have enough power to accelerate uphill, especially with the air conditioning chasing the stifling heat away. “Windows open,” yells Jeremy from the wheel, as he turns off the air-con. He doesn’t waste words, I come to learn, and so our writhing bus becomes a safari vehicle and the little details outside quickly become more exciting: our nostrils full of earth, woodsmoke and diesel, before we head into an interior laden with foilage. An out-of-tune steel band would make less rattle and hum than we do. As we lurch uphill, vendors at tarp-covered stalls appear in whizz-by auditions wielding pineapples, breadfruit and mangoes. 

Grenada is oval-shaped, almost like the cacao fruit on which many of its farmers so heavily depend, and, at the island’s heart, is the seed of so much of this growth: Grand Etang Lake, a mineral-rich crater basin, which empties into the upper headwaters of steep-sided ravines and the tributary of the raging Great River. The air is heavy when we step out at the road’s highest point, 1,910ft above sea level. Just east of Grenada’s tallest volcanoes, we have views of the Caribbean Sea, the shallow curve of Grand Mal Bay and the wonderfully named Mount Qua Qua, framed in forest green, views that Columbus would have kicked himself for missing.

As I wander the trail to Grand Etang Lake, the landscape — what’s here and what isn’t — fills my mind. In recent decades, Grenada has been hit by several tropical storms, including Hurricane Ivan, which caused widespread damage during the 2004 season. When its westward jog across the island began, palms were scythed and the national park’s high forest canopy toppled. The good news is that species are recuperating and every candlewood or mahogany tree in the forest is knee-deep in its own recovery, with a mosaic of broad low buttresses on the forest floor now reaching from shadow into light. At the same time, the sight of the rainforest parting and the sky dissolving into the crater lake fills my vision, the silvery surface merging with the regrouping clouds as I reach the water’s edge. Somewhere, the monkeys are still looking on. It’s like being in my own Indiana Jones movie.

In the days that follow, we peel back the many layers of Grenada, as if we were gradually dehusking a coconut. There’s much more for us to see and so we drive on, searching. A common urge is to wallow on one of Grenada’s 45 beaches but I’m drawn instead to the colour of the deep-green highlands, the fruit bowl jumble of the markets and the burnt umber of the chocolate factories. 

Even so, appearances of cocoa bean plantations on Caribbean islands are increasingly rare nowadays. Here, they appear fleetingly by roadsides, almost in a state of stasis, at odds with the satisfyingly fat heavyweight producers of the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Ecuador. And it seems today that the Grenada cocoa farmers’ raison d’être is to provide a more refined response to their supposed rivals. Almost as if their story is worthy of a more romantic reimagining. 

At least, I sense this is the case in St Andrew parish at Jouvay, a low-key production site built tight into a cradle of cacoa trees from where seeds are effortlessly harvested. It’s empty when I arrive, except for Nolan, a tour guide who talks little, but laughs a lot. “We’re just a tiny dot on the map, hard to find, but you get the best chocolate in the world right here,” he says, cackling. 

The work has finished for the day and so we have the run of the factory to ourselves during our spontaneous visit. The building is almost a relic, with a ragged profile, empty wooden floors, bare-stone walls and basement level that leads to silent sheds of drying racks, where millions of raw cocoa beans the colour of dark chocolate huddle in the dark. Tomorrow, they’ll be wheeled back out into the morning sun, like a tanning shop on steroids. The soundtrack, Nolan says, is always the soft tambourine rattle of the seeds being raked.

Eventually we come to the barrows for storing cacao pods. Nolan picks one out. There, he says, driving a knife into the seed to break the skin before ringing the blade around its midriff — one swift move and it opens like a Fabergé egg to reveal a gelatinous white centre and clump of beans. He looks happy. “We make cocoa tea from this,” he says, handing me the pod to smell —the scent is musty, almost sour, and sticks to my palm. “It’s like Viagra and an island bestseller.” He cackles again, slapping me on the shoulder. 

Like cacao, sugarcane processing was a popular industry across the Lesser Antilles, along with its byproduct, molasses. River Antoine Rum Distillery in St Patrick parish, with its waterwheel-powered machinery and cane crushers, is Grenada’s most historic warehouse, opening in the island’s north in 1785 shortly after the island was ceded to British colonisers by the French. But on my last afternoon, I instead drop into Clarke’s Court, and nowhere, I think, captures the spirit of Grenadian hospitality — of informality, indulgence and intoxication — quite like it.

In the company of guide Danny, I join a tour of the distillery’s corrugated hangar, its belly opening up to a skeleton of oxide-red piping, gantries, tired vats and tanks — some looking salvaged from a scrapyard. There is a distinct feeling of merriment in the air despite it being technically a work day. Rum is an integral part of Caribbean culture, used across the region as a tonic to baptise newborns, remember the dead and chase demons away — and it’s not hard to appreciate the sense of open-armed gesture and friendship born from this marvellous liquid sunshine.

Rum now in hand, I can taste that warmth too. The intense vanilla spirit glosses over my tongue and throat, the alcohol instantly affecting me at Nick’s Barrel House, next to the factory floor and where merchandise is sold to visitors and calypso music plays on TV. The sweet melodies fit the mood and there’s an undercurrent of deep satisfaction as the browns, coppers and caramels of the different aged rums are swirled in glasses like newly mixed paints. Around me, locals empty shots of nutmeg, cinnamon and hibiscus-imbued rum, twirling and laughing. 

Later, back in St George’s, I think of the other Caribbean islands I know — Jamaica, Barbados, the Dominican Republic — and of all the tourists there, hurrying around each island impatiently in search of their own little slice of paradise. It could be the evening’s sun, which glows golden before dropping from the horizon like a coin into a slot, but I look back towards the mist-wreathed rainforest, volcanoes, winding roads and tropical pleasures and watch for a while, hopeful that the island will continue to thrive throughout the next 50 years. In Grenada, it feels like history is happening right now.