Mount Carmel Falls

Nobody at our guesthouse in Grand Anse had heard of Mount Carmel Falls when I asked, which is exactly why I wanted to go. Everyone talks about Concord and Annandale, but a bartender who grew up in St. Andrew parish mentioned a place near the village of Marisole where two waterfalls drop side by side into the same pool. Lia looked it up and found it’s also called Marisole Falls, and that it’s supposedly one of the tallest on the island — something like 21 metres. That settled it. We rented a car the next morning and drove into the interior, past nutmeg trees and roadside stands selling cocoa balls, until the pavement narrowed and a local kid pointed us toward a trail.

What I loved immediately is how short the walk in is. After some of the hikes we’d done elsewhere in Grenada, I was bracing for an hour of mud and roots, but this one took maybe fifteen minutes from the roadside, dropping through thick rainforest before the sound of falling water gave it away. Then the trees opened up and there they were — two cascades, side by side, pouring into the same rock pool like a mirror image of each other. I just stood there for a minute before even getting my camera out.

There was a young guy there, a local guide, who’d set up near the ledge above the pool. Without much warning he climbed up the rock face beside the falls and dove straight into the water below. Lia grabbed my arm — we hadn’t expected that at all. He did it two more times while we swam, grinning each time he surfaced, clearly enjoying showing off for the handful of visitors who’d made it out here. We tipped him well; that’s not something you see at the bigger, more commercial falls.

We swam for almost an hour, moving between the two currents, feeling the difference in force between them. The water was cold in the way that rainforest pools always are, but clear enough to see the bottom, and there was nobody else there the whole time apart from the guide and one other couple who left shortly after we arrived. It’s the kind of place that reminds you why we keep coming back to Grenada’s interior instead of sticking to the beaches.

When to go: We went in February, right in the dry season that runs January through May, and the water was calm and clear enough to see straight to the bottom — I’d skip the wetter months if swimming is the whole point of the trip.