Trinidad and Tobago

Port of Spain — the most culturally sophisticated city in the Caribbean — with the Queen’s Park Savannah (3.7km circumference, the largest urban park in the world by some measures, surrounded by the Magnificent Seven colonial mansions), the National Museum and Art Gallery, the food court at the Queen’s Park Savannah where doubles vendors serve from 5am.

💡 Trinidad has produced a disproportionate share of the intellectual and cultural output of the Caribbean — V.S. Naipaul (Nobel Prize Literature 2001), C.L.R. James (the most important Black intellectual of the 20th century), Lord Kitchener and the Mighty Sparrow (the two greatest calypsonians of the 20th century), and the invention of the steel pan (the only new acoustic musical instrument invented in the 20th century).

The Panyard of Renegades or Phase II Pan Groove — where pan yards open for public practice in the evenings (September–February, most intensely in Carnival season). The National Academy for the Performing Arts (2009, the finest concert hall in the Caribbean). The Ariapita Avenue restaurant and bar strip for the evening — the best food in the Caribbean per square kilometre.

💡 The steel pan was invented in Trinidad in the 1930s — developed from oil drums discarded by American military bases during WWII, tuned by hammering the head into concave sections. Winston “Spree” Simon is credited with the first pan capable of playing a full melody (1939). By 1960, full steel orchestras of 100+ players were competing at Panorama.

40 min from Port of Spain. The Asa Wright Nature Centre (a 190-hectare former cocoa estate in the cloud forest, the most bird-accessible site in the Caribbean — 465 species of bird, with hummingbirds feeding 3m from the veranda at dawn) and the Oilbird Cave at Dunston Cave (the only accessible nesting colony of oilbirds in Trinidad).

💡 The oilbird (Steatornis caripensis) — a cave-nesting, fruit-eating bird that navigates by echolocation like a bat — nests in darkness in the Dunston Cave in the Asa Wright forest. It is nocturnal, roosts in colonies of hundreds, and was rendered for oil by indigenous peoples (giving its name). Trinidad’s Dunston Cave is the most accessible oilbird colony in the world.

2h30 fast ferry from Port of Spain or 25-min flight to Crown Point (TAB). Tobago — 300km², 60,000 people, dramatically less developed than Trinidad — has Store Bay (the most relaxed beach on the island), the Buccoo Reef (a fringing reef walkable at low tide — the most accessible coral reef in Trinidad and Tobago) and the oldest rum shop in the Caribbean.

💡 The Buccoo Reef glass-bottom boat tour — a 1.5h trip from the Crown Point area to the Nylon Pool (a natural shallow lagoon of turquoise water over white sand, in the middle of the sea, where legend holds that bathing makes you younger) and the Buccoo Reef itself — is Tobago’s most visited experience. Cost: TT$150–200pp.

Grande Riviere (90 min from Crown Point, accessible via the north coast road) or Matura Beach on Trinidad — the highest density leatherback sea turtle (Dermochelys coriacea) nesting beach in the world. Up to 500 nests per night at Grande Riviere in peak season (May–July); the turtles average 1.5m long and 500kg.

💡 The leatherback sea turtle is the largest living reptile — up to 2m long and 700kg. Tobago’s Grande Riviere beach has the highest nesting density on earth: up to 300–500 females nesting per night at peak season, laying 80–120 eggs per nest, then returning to sea. They migrate from the Arctic to the tropics and back; the round trip exceeds 15,000km.

2h from Crown Point. Little Tobago (a 1km² uninhabited island off the Speyside coast) — one of the most important seabird nesting sites in the eastern Caribbean, with red-billed tropicbirds, magnificent frigatebirds and boobies nesting in the trees. The boat journey from Speyside passes over the finest coral reef in Tobago.

💡 Little Tobago (also called “Bird of Paradise Island”) was the site of an attempt to establish a colony of Greater birds-of-paradise brought from the Aru Islands in 1909 by British ornithologist Sir William Ingram. The colony survived until the 1963 hurricane. The current seabird colony of 38 species includes species found nowhere else in the southern Caribbean.

The Tobago Main Ridge Forest Reserve (established 1776 by a British parliamentary act — the oldest protected forest reserve in the Western Hemisphere, pre-dating the US National Parks by nearly 100 years) — a 41km² cloud forest running the length of northern Tobago with waterfalls, motmots, mangroves and the most undisturbed forest ecology in the Lesser Antilles. Fly from TAB.

💡 The 1776 Tobago Forest Act was passed because the British colonists had observed that deforestation on Barbados had caused serious water shortages — and concluded (correctly) that tropical forests were the source of rainfall. This was one of the earliest examples of scientific environmental legislation anywhere in the world.