Les Cayes

The thing about Les Cayes is that it’s not trying to impress you. The other major Haitian cities — Port-au-Prince with its urban intensity, Cap-Haïtien with its colonial grandeur — both seem aware of themselves in the way that places with tourist histories become aware of themselves. Les Cayes, the capital of the Sud department in the country’s south, is simply a working port city of around 150,000 people who have things to do that are more important than your visit. I find this, in practice, enormously refreshing.

I arrived on the bus from Port-au-Prince, a journey that had taken six hours on roads that ranged from excellent to aspirational, and I walked from the bus terminal through the center of town in the late afternoon to the guesthouse I’d booked. The streets near the market were full of the particular end-of-business-day energy — vendors packing up, children running, the smell of food cooking for the evening. The city center has a particular rhythm: busy in the morning, slow in the midday heat, alive again from about four in the afternoon.

The Cayes area has long been associated with the production of Haitian rum — Barbancourt, the most famous brand, has its agricultural operations partly in this region, and there are smaller local distilleries producing clairin, the raw sugarcane spirit that is the working person’s drink in Haiti. Clairin is not for the faint of heart: it is funky, fierce, agricultural in a way that makes you aware of the sugarcane it came from. I had it one night at a bar near the waterfront, mixed with local citrus, and it tasted like Haiti distilled into a glass — emphatic, specific, not apologizing for anything.

The seafood here is the best argument for spending a night in Les Cayes rather than just passing through on the way to Île-à-Vache. The city sits on a bay that’s productive for fishing, and the restaurants near the waterfront serve lambi in several preparations — stewed, grilled, in a sauce of tomato and Scotch bonnet — along with whatever fish came in that day. I ate fried snapper one evening at a table set up outdoors with a view of the harbor lights, the fish so fresh it tasted almost sweet, the pikliz alongside it bright and acidic and restoring. The woman who ran the restaurant came out twice to check that the fish was acceptable. It was considerably more than acceptable.

The old town has some colonial-era architecture worth seeking out — faded and partially ruined, but the bones of the French settlement are visible in the street grid and in several buildings near the main square that have survived everything, including the 2021 earthquake which caused significant damage in the surrounding region. That damage is still visible in places, and it is not something to photograph with a tourist’s detachment. The city is rebuilding at its own pace, which is not always the pace of outside observers, and the people here have a relationship to resilience that is not performed for anyone’s benefit.

When to go: November through April is the best period for the south — drier, cooler, and calm enough for the boat to Île-à-Vache. Avoid the months directly following major weather events, when road conditions can be severe. Les Cayes is also the departure point for Île-à-Vache and for the Pic Macaya national park in the mountains to the east, making it a logical base for several days.