Grand Etang

Most people come to Grenada and never leave the sand, which is fair enough, because the beaches are absurd. But drive twenty minutes up into the island’s green spine and the temperature drops, the light goes soft and grey-green, and you arrive at Grand Etang, a lake sitting in the crater of an extinct volcano roughly 530 metres above the sea. After the glare of the coast, the cool damp hush of it came as a genuine relief.

A lake in a volcano’s mouth

Grand Etang sits at the heart of the national forest reserve that shares its name, and the water has that flat, secretive stillness that mountain lakes get when cloud sits low over them. Local legend insists the lake is bottomless, which it is not, but standing on the visitor-centre deck with mist sliding across the surface I understood entirely why people decided it must be. There is something about water in a dead volcano that makes you want to invent stories.

We walked the short shoreline loop first, an easy boardwalk-and-trail affair, and then took on the steeper Morne LaBaye trail through dripping forest thick with ferns, tree ferns, and the occasional flash of a mona monkey overhead. Those monkeys, introduced from West Africa centuries ago, have figured out exactly what a tourist’s pocket contains and will conduct brisk, unsentimental negotiations for a banana. Lia lost a granola bar to one in a transaction so smooth she applauded.

Spice in the air, properly

This is the Spice Isle and nowhere makes you believe it like the interior. The slopes around Grand Etang are stitched with nutmeg and cocoa, and the forest air genuinely carries that warm, sweet, slightly medicinal nutmeg smell, the same one that perfumes every market on the island. On the drive up we stopped at a roadside stall where a woman split a fresh nutmeg open to show us the scarlet lace of mace wrapped around the seed, then waved off our money. That kind of casual generosity is, for me, the real flavour of Grenada.

If you have the legs, the longer hike to the summit of Mount Qua Qua follows a knife-edge ridge with views clear across the island to the sea on both sides. We turned back early when the cloud closed in and the trail turned to red soup, which I regret not at all. The mountain will keep.

Going up there

Grand Etang is an easy drive or bus ride from St. George’s, and there is a small entrance fee and a visitor centre with maps. Bring a light rain layer regardless of the coastal forecast, because the interior makes its own weather and makes it often. Decent shoes for the trails, water, and a relaxed attitude toward monkeys eyeing your bag. Go in the morning before the cloud thickens, and give the lake a few quiet minutes before the next van of day-trippers rolls in.