The bay crossing
The vedette from Fort-de-France costs almost nothing and takes about twenty minutes, cutting straight across the Baie de Fort-de-France. On the boat you get a view of the capital you don’t get from inside it — the city spread along the waterfront, the hills stacked behind it, the container ships anchored offshore. Then the boat swings south and the skyline shrinks and Les Trois-Îlets appears, low and green and considerably quieter.
This is how I prefer to arrive anywhere, honestly: by water, looking back at where I came from. Lia stayed in Fort-de-France that morning to spend time at the market, so I made the crossing alone, with coffee from the ferry snack bar going lukewarm in my hand, watching the city recede.
The village square and the question of Joséphine
The main square of Les Trois-Îlets is small and sun-struck and anchored by a pale yellow church whose construction dates to the mid-eighteenth century. In a small chapel at the back, the parish register records the baptism of Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, born in June 1763. She would become Empress Joséphine, Napoleon’s first wife, the most famous person ever connected to this island.
Martinique has a complicated relationship with Joséphine. The statue of her in Fort-de-France famously stands headless, twice decapitated — her reputation dimmed by her alleged role in reinstating slavery under Napoleon. In Trois-Îlets the museum dedicated to her birth estate (La Pagerie, about two kilometers from the village center) presents her story with considerably more neutrality than most visitors would find comfortable.
I went anyway. The ruins of the sugar estate are genuinely evocative — cut stone walls, an ancient stone bathtub, the remains of a boiling house — and the grounds are cool and shaded in a way that makes the walk worth it in the midday heat regardless of how you feel about the museum’s framing.
Water and the village rhythm
The village itself is best experienced slowly: coffee at one of the tables in the square, a walk down to the small fishing beach where the painted pirogues come in, a look at the pottery workshops that have operated in the nearby hamlet of La Poterie for generations. The clay soil in this part of Martinique apparently produces particularly workable earth, and the pottery tradition predates European settlement.
The tourist infrastructure here is anchored heavily toward the beach hotels that line the coast to the west — Pointe du Bout, Anse Mitan — but if you walk five minutes away from the marina strip, the village reasserts itself. An old woman selling christophines from a plastic crate. School kids in blue uniforms eating snow cones. The smell of baking bread from a boulangerie that, like most good boulangeries in French territories, opens twice daily and closes the moment the bread is gone.
Afternoon on the water
The calmer waters of the bay’s southern shore make for good kayaking and paddleboarding, and several outfitters around the Anse Mitan beach rent equipment without requiring reservations. I spent an hour drifting out toward the moored sailboats, then paddling back in before the afternoon squall built up over the mountains to the north.
The ferry back to Fort-de-France runs until late evening, so there’s no rush. I ate a plate of accras and a bowl of bouillon de poisson at a waterfront snack before the last comfortable crossing, watching the lights come on in the capital across the water.
When to go: December through May offers dry, clear skies and manageable heat. The bay is calm year-round on this leeward side, making it reliable for water activities even outside peak season. Avoid major holiday weekends when day-trippers from Fort-de-France can crowd the ferry and the beach.