Pointe-à-Pitre

The first thing I noticed was the smell. Pointe-à-Pitre’s waterfront market — La Darse, the old commercial wharf — has a particular combination of diesel from the inter-island ferries, salt water, ripe mangoes, and something frying in deep oil that hits you as a unified sensory event rather than as separate components. I was there at quarter past seven on a Thursday and the market was already at full pitch, vendors calling to each other across the stalls, a man selling fresh coconuts from the back of a small truck by splitting them with a machete and handing them over with a straw, the whole transaction taking about eight seconds and producing something that tasted better than any coconut water I’d ever paid three euros for in a supermarket.

The city behind the market is the kind of place that travel writing tends to call “authentic,” which is a word I distrust because it usually means “poor and photogenic.” Pointe-à-Pitre is neither of those things straightforwardly. It’s a French Caribbean city that has been through a series of earthquakes and fires and hurricanes and come back each time into a slightly different configuration, so that the architecture is a layered thing — nineteenth-century iron-columned commercial buildings standing next to 1970s concrete and the occasional preserved Creole house with wooden jalousied windows painted in yellow or deep red. The Place de la Victoire is the colonial administrative square, shaded by old sandbox trees, where old men play dominoes in the afternoons with tremendous focus. I sat nearby for an hour and watched four separate games without once being invited to leave.

The market proper — the covered Marché Saint-Antoine inland from the waterfront — is where I spent most of my mornings. Guadeloupean accras are best hot, which means best bought from the women who fry them at the market stalls starting at dawn: small, crunchy, the salt cod inside soft and seasoned with thyme and Scotch bonnet, eaten in threes and fours while standing because there is nowhere to sit and also because they’re slightly too hot to hold for long. I developed an alarming daily habit and cannot say I regret it.

The Memorial ACTe museum, a strikingly angular building on the waterfront dedicated to the history of slavery and the slave trade in the Caribbean, is worth a full half-day. It’s serious and well-designed and refuses to make the history it documents comfortable, which is exactly right. I went in the afternoon when the light through the glass panels on the facade creates particular patterns on the interior floors, and came out needing to walk for a long time. The city accommodates that — its streets are good for walking, alive and warm, and the harbor is always visible.

When to go: Pointe-à-Pitre functions year-round. The market is best on weekday mornings (Tuesday through Saturday), with Saturday drawing the largest crowds. The Carnival period in February–March brings tremendous street life — costumed processions, music until late — but accommodation books up fast. The city itself is a transit hub, so even if you’re basing yourself elsewhere on the island, a morning in Pointe-à-Pitre before heading into Basse-Terre is a good way to begin.