St. George's

The road from the airport sweeps around the southern tip of the island before dropping into St. George’s, and there is a moment — just as the land bends — where the entire harbour opens below you at once. The Carenage, the inner horseshoe of water framed by warehouses painted ochre and terracotta and faded blue, and beyond it the hillside stacked with houses climbing toward Fort George like an audience that never quite got enough seats. I pulled over. The taxi driver looked at me with the patient tolerance of someone who has watched this happen a thousand times.

St. George’s is, genuinely, one of the more beautiful capital cities in the Caribbean. That phrase gets thrown around carelessly about places that have one nice waterfront and a renovated colonial quarter. Here it means something. The Carenage — the inner harbour road — runs beneath the hill at water level, and at six in the morning, before the heat settles in, you can walk it with fishing boats on one side and the smell of diesel and salt water, watching the day start. A couple of men mending nets. A ferry loading for Carriacou. A bakery already open, its window full of coconut bread.

Saturday is when the market comes into its own. The central market spreads across a block near the bus terminal, and by eight in the morning it is dense with vendors and the smell of things ground fresh. Stalls of nutmeg and mace, cinnamon quills, dried bay leaves, turmeric roots with their papery skin and violent orange interior. Cocoa balls — the compressed, unsweetened raw chocolate used to make Grenadian cocoa tea — stacked like dark cannon shot. The women here know their product with the authority of people who grew it themselves. One vendor told me without being asked that her nutmeg was from St. Patrick’s parish, the north, and that north nutmeg runs sweeter than the stuff from the interior. I bought a bag. She was right.

From the market, the town climbs in every direction. Fort George sits at the top of a rocky promontory, its eighteenth-century British construction looking down over both the inner harbour and the outer roadstead. The views from the fort’s gun emplacements are extraordinary — the kind where you understand immediately why whoever held this position held the island. The fort also carries more recent history: it was here in 1983 that Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was executed, a moment that preceded the US invasion and ended the short-lived revolutionary period. The plaques are modest. The weight of the place is not.

For eating, I kept returning to the Carenage-side places that serve oil-down — the national dish of breadfruit, salted meat, and whatever vegetables came available, all stewed slow in coconut milk with dasheen bush leaves wilting through it. It is not a beautiful dish. It is dark and dense and requires full attention. At a small counter place with four plastic tables and a handwritten menu, a woman named Paulette ladled it out with the confidence of someone who had been making it longer than I had been alive. I ate it in about eight minutes and thought about ordering again.

When to go: St. George’s works year-round, but the Saturday market is essential, and the dry season months of January through April bring the clearest skies and coolest mornings for walking the hillside streets. The Carriacou Regatta in late July and Grenada’s own Carnival in August bring the city alive with a noise level that rewards advance booking.